It’s publication day! This Land Is Our Land is available at your local bookstore. Here’s one last pitch (of several last pitches) to buy my book…
You will learn a lot about your country. I know this because, to write this book, I had to learn a lot about our country.
Forget the right to roam and the more radical aspects of the book. You can be completely against my theories on private property, and still get a lot out of this. I spend one chapter giving the WHOLE history of property, from our hunter-gatherer past, to the Code of Hammurabi, to Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on property, to the Clearances of Scotland, to the Rambler’s “mass trespass” of the mountain Kinder Scout, to today. You will also learn about:
-your state’s recreational use statutes
-the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment
-Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course and how his people photograph old women urinating
-the cost and overvisitation of our national parks
-John Locke’s theories of property, which impacted how the new American colonies thought of property
-how philosopher John Rawls’s theories on justice tie into my own proposals
-the amount of Americans killed in hunting accidents per year
-statistics that illustrate Americans’ nature-deficit disorders
-statistics about how racially segregated and politically polarized we are
-“green prescribing,” which is a unique method of medically prescribing NATURE to ill patients
-the philosophies of Wiliam Cronon on wilderness
-Texas’s legendary anti-litter campaign, “Don’t Mess with Texas!”
-whether you’re allowed to kill people with tough-sounding “Make My Day” and “Castle Doctrine”
laws.
-our annual $20 billion subsidies to American farmers and ranchers
-the lost verses of Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”
Once you look at American history from a new angle (in this case the boring-sounding topic of PROPERTY) you will view your country in new and interesting ways.
Look at it this way… I make sure I keep up on the latest books on topics related to race, gender, and poverty. I do so not for fun (it’s usually depressing stuff that makes me feel privileged and guilty), but to stay informed and to strive to be a worldly citizen. A book on the under-discussed topic of property (which has not been written to depress) will catch you up on matters outside of your base of knowledge.
Will stop peddling my wares soon, promise.