Daegan Miller. This Radical Land

Daegan Miller presents four essays rooted in landscapes of nineteenth-century America to make the case that there have always been thinkers and actors for whom nature had a higher purpose than capitalist greed. Trees—characterized as “the past’s oldest witness” (from the book’s first sentence)—play a central role throughout This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. Each essay has what Miller calls a witness tree that “stands as the central, organizing, orienting landmark” for the tale to be told (6). Miller starts with the willow under which Henry David Thoreau stood. Thoreau made his living as a surveyor dividing land into knowable fragments essential for establishment of property rights, the accumulation of wealth, and the advance of capitalism. But Thoreau dissented, using his maps, and particularly a map of the Concord River, to document and protest privatizing of public good in an act Miller described as “liberation cartography” (43).

Capitalism · Dissent · Environmental ethics · Miller · Political science · Witness · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies