Today, we are in a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the property itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on components of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth-a community founded on the well-being of most people as well as the natural world.

In the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco areas from the Carolinas to the general public lands of the West, Jedediah Purdy-one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers- about This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth shows how the property has always united and divided Americans, holding us in keeping tasks and fates but also separating us into insiders and outsiders, owners and dependents, workers and bosses. Expropriated from Local Americans and transformed by slave labor, the same land that represents a brief history of racism and exploitation could, in the face of environmental catastrophe, bind us together in human relationships of reciprocity and mutual responsibility.

This might seem idealistic in our polarized time, but we are at a historical fork in the street, and if we do not make efforts now to go toward a commonwealth, Purdy warns, environmental and political pressures will create harsher and crueler conflicts-between citizens, between countries, and between humans and all of those other world.