Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New Land Ethic

Rating:
Summary: A Bound Classic
Review: Freyfogle's volume is a little-known classic, a wide-ranging, thoughtful, even lyrical inquiry into the ways we see the land and understand our place in it. The book is hard to categorize, for it transcends all academic fields and conventional ways of thinking about environmental issues. Freyfogle's well-grounded premise is that our environmental problems are, at root, cultural ones, having to do with our over-reliance on liberal individualism in all its forms. Step by step, he encourages us to rethink our cultural presumptions, and urges us in a gentle, reflective way to imagine landscapes that healthier, for nature and people. At the center of his own vision is the idea of "land health," which he proposes as an alternative to sustainable development and its alternatives. Some readers will conclude that he is too ambitious in calling for a reshaping of our dominant culture; others that he is too hesitant to assign blame to bad actors, rather than to society as a whole. But many will agree with the observation of historian Don Worster that "among the many voices trying to articulate an environmental philosophy for our time, Eric Freyfogle is unsurpassed."

Rating:
Summary: a hopeful vision, an elegant book
Review: Readers who are familiar with environmental writing will recognize the homage to Aldo Leopold in the subtitle (envisioning a new land ethic). Surprisingly, the landscape that produced what must be among Leopold's most pessimistic essays (Illinois Bus Ride [Sand County Almanac]) also produced this author and inspired him to a hopeful vision concerning the evolution of our relationship to the land we live on. Freyfogle argues for stengthening the relationships between communities and their environment. He presents a philisophical defence to radical individualism and unrestrained free-market capatalism that would have us few the the environment as just so many natural resources to be exploited. A legal expert in property law, Freyfogle walks us through history, precedents, and implications with remarkalble clarity. Read this book for its hopefulness - and you will learn something in the bargain.