Thrown Together: The New Politics of the Land
Social, political and racial divisions are always deeply connected to decisions about how we carve up and treat the land.
Photo by Ron Whitaker .
So much has now been written about climate change that it is becoming difficult to know what more we can, or should, say about it. The science is blindingly obvious and the catalogue of disasters attributable to it thickens on a nearly daily basis. Venice is sinking into the sea, New South Wales and California are on fire, the Arctic is melting before our eyes, coastlines are crumbling, whole biomes are surging northward and into alpine regions, teenagers are warning adults of a grim reckoning. Everything seems to be in flux now, not least our politics.
Jedediah Purdy has just published a book, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, that can help us understand the political dimension of our crisis. An environmental writer and professor at Columbia Law School, Purdy has long focused his attention on the intersection of society and ecology. In 2015 he published, to wide acclaim, After Nature: Politics in the Anthropocene.
That book examined how “the land” has been conceptualized over the course of the past three centuries of American history, demonstrating how Americans have never really grasped the irreducibly political aspect of the human-land nexus. Purdy shows how the same “anti-political” set of attitudes are at work in both the dispossession of Native Americans and the neoliberal disaster capitalism that is the hallmark of maladaptation to climate disruption. As this example indicates, he is a strikingly talented connector of events and ideas.
In place of After Nature’s deep historical dive, This Land grapples with more contemporary events, like the rise of Trumpism and the Green New Deal. Here is how Purdy expresses the book’s central concern:
People whose lives are already entangled ecologically and economically will be thrown together in new ways: when refugees from storms and droughts and resource wars crash against the gates of Europe and the United States, when one country and then another tries its own version of geoengineering.
“Thrown together.” That’s the leitmotif of our age, the age of climate crisis. Flows of carbon across political boundaries have led to flows of saltwater, drought and fire, and these to flows of people, non-human species, diseases, and so on. It’s a boundary-busting new reality. Purdy wants to know what all of this means for Americans. He is, he says, keen to explore the “the crises of American life in terms of the meaning of this land, the value of these lives here, for the people who believe they have a homeland in this country and others who feel they live here in a sort of exile.”
Is this focus yet another expression of American exceptionalism, as though the American story about how people relate to the land is more important than those of other national cultures? It’s tempting to cast it that way, but we should resist the temptation. Purdy is not blind to the many ways the climate crisis breaks down international and intergenerational boundaries, forcing us to consider how policies cooked up “at home” will impact the lives and fortunes of those far flung in space or time. But there’s nothing obviously objectionable about nevertheless deciding to focus on what is happening here. After all, the law--Purdy’s area of expertise--is itself a symbolic expression of what matters to people who think of themselves as thickly connected to one another through a shared history, language, institutions, and so on. In this respect, Purdy’s work is a model to others wanting to say something analogous about the lands they inhabit, all of which is compatible with taking seriously the larger dimensions of our problems.
History is irrepressible in Purdy’s narrative, whether he is telling the story of families in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose wells have been poisoned by leaked fracking fluids, or the troubled relations between organized labor and the environmental movement over the past 40 years. He is at his most lyrical, and most persuasive, when moving between the past and present, the temporal phases pressed seamlessly together by personal reflections.
After Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, for example, Purdy expresses astonishment not so much at the event itself as at how so many of us, himself included, failed to see it coming. This realization occasions some sober reflection on the bubbles we all seem to inhabit these days. If we were wrong about this guy, what else might we be wrong about? That’s a thought available to any of us, but it’s what happens next in the story that sets Purdy apart from garden-variety reactions to the election. For how many of us sought solace at that time in … Thoreau?
Purdy does just that, and the result is a masterful analysis of what it means to “lose a country.” In 1854, Massachusetts invoked the Fugitive Slave Act to send Anthony Burns back to a Virginia slaveholder. Thoreau, an environmentalist and abolitionist, was devastated and looked to nature to sort out his thoughts and feelings. The result was ambiguous. Perhaps he believed walking around his ponds would give him ease. If so, he was disappointed; after all, “…what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?” So too for Purdy in the middle weeks of November 2016, but in his case the feeling resulted in a partial turning away from nature lest its unwonted beauty deceive him into believing all was in fact well. To forestall this possibility, he “trusted only the days when the sun did not come out at all.”
There’s a deep lesson lurking in that reaction. It’s not, as the idea of withdrawal from nature might imply, that we should sever the connection between nature and politics-- rather, we should insist ever more pointedly on it. The withdrawal would be merely precious if it were not accompanied by a clear-eyed perception of what we should be talking about and how we should be talking about it. It’s a way of re-establishing orientation through its opposite, profound disorientation. As Purdy says, “losing a country may be a way of describing coming to see it more clearly.”
These conversations should be centered on what the land means to us. Consider the President’s December 2017 removal of more than a million acres of land from Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah from federal protection, land that has been in the sights of coal and uranium interests for decades. The executive directive strikes many as a form of vandalism, but you’ll likely get different reactions to it from ranchers or miners, most of whom embrace the move. The key, for Purdy, is that everyone will defend their stance by talking about the ways the land shapes what it means to be American.
Purdy is imploring Americans to politicize nature frankly and unromantically. This ties him to an older tradition originating in the work of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin was an anarchist social and environmental thinker who argued that if we work honestly to heal the human/nature split, we will also find ourselves addressing social, economic and racial divisions. This is Social Ecology, the philosophical impetus for a whole range of critical environmental positions including the ecosocialism we now identify with Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein, among others. It informs the Green New Deal. As diverse as these individuals, schools and documents are (Sanders is no anarchist, after all), they share the notion that deep social, political and racial divisions are always connected to legally encoded decisions about how we carve up and treat the land. It places a whole cluster of complex issues within a single frame and has, for this reason, extraordinary explanatory force.
In Purdy’s hands, this focus opens up real possibilities for crafting what he calls “a new politics of deep reciprocity.” Like it or not, the climate crisis is throwing us together in ways we could not have predicted before its onset. Purdy wants us to cultivate what unites us, which is exactly what we should be stressing as the crisis deepens.
To oversimplify just a bit, there’s an ongoing battle for the soul of our new epoch, the Anthropocene, pitting three moral-ideological stances against one another: quietistic doom, dismissive denial, and hopeful salvation. Think of Roy Scranton, Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard) and Pope Francis. By putting the opportunities for political solidarity--between genders, workers and environmentalists, racialized groups and a vanishing white majority, believers and non-believers, boomers and millennials, and more--at the heart of his analysis, Purdy offers us a way to think beyond this stale triangulation of perspectives. A politics of solidarity becomes the fulcrum of a larger existential reorientation. That’s progress.
This Land is not without its blemishes. A more sustained treatment of the Green New Deal, for instance, would have been helpful. More importantly, however, Purdy is too eager to disavow the fundamentally moral nature of his argument. “Democratic politics,” he urges, “can survive not as a morality play but only as a project.” That distinction seems strained. The project, after all, has to do with building a more caring union of citizens—a commonwealth—out of the current divisions and ideological rancor. That is clearly a moral project, even if it is also intrinsically political. These points aside, Purdy’s message is one we desperately need to absorb.
Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo. He has published widely on the philosophical aspects of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene. His latest book is The Ethics of Climate Change: An Introduction (Routledge, 2018). Profile: byronwilliston.com. Twitter: @ClimatePhilo.
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