Dialogue about Land Justice provides a solid understanding for readers of the key issues around native title from the minds of leading thinkers, commentators and senior jurists. It consolidates sixteen papers presented to the national Native Title Conference since the historic Mabo judgment.

In recent decades, the various strands of the food movement have made enormous strides in calling attention the many shortcomings and injustices of our food and agricultural system. Farmers, activists, scholars, and everyday citizens have also worked creatively to rebuild local food economies, advocate for food justice, and promote more sustainable, agroecological farming practices. However, the movement for fairer, healthier, and more autonomous food is continually blocked by one obstacle: land access. As long as land remains unaffordable and inaccessible to most people, we cannot truly transform the food system. The term land-grabbing is most commonly used to refer to the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in Asian, African, or Latin American countries by foreign investors. However, land has and continues to be “grabbed” in North America, as well, through discrimination, real estate speculation, gentrification, financialization, extractive energy production, and tourism. This edited volume, with chapters from a wide range of activists and scholars, explores the history of land theft, dispossession, and consolidation in the United States. It also looks at alternative ways forward toward democratized, land justice, based on redistributive policies and cooperative ownership models. With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United States. From there, it moves into a collectively-authored section on Black Agrarianism, which details the long history of land dispossession among Black farmers in the southeastern US, as well as the creative acts of resistance they have used to acquire land and collectively farm it. The next section, on gender, explores structural and cultural discrimination against women landowners in the Midwest and also role of “womanism” in land-based struggles. Next, a section on the cross-border implications of land enclosures and consolidations includes a consideration of what land justice could mean for farm workers in the US, followed by an essay on the challenges facing young and aspiring farmers. Finally, the book explores the urban dimensions of land justice and their implications for locally-autonomous food systems, and lessons from previous struggles for democratized land access. Ultimately, the book makes the case that to move forward to a more equitable, just, sustainable, and sovereign agriculture system, the various strands of the food movement must come together for land justice.

“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.

How can North Americans come to terms with the lamentable clash between indigenous and settler cultures, faiths, and attitudes toward creation? Showcasing a variety of voices—both traditional and Christian, native and non-native—Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry offers up alternative histories, radical theologies, and poetic, life-giving memories that can unsettle our souls and work toward reconciliation. This book is intended for all who are interested in healing historical wounds of racism, stolen land, and cultural exploitation. Essays on land use, creation, history, and faith appear among poems and reflections by people across ethnic and religious divides. The writers do not always agree—in fact, some are bound to raise readers&rsqup; defenses. But they represent the hard truths that we must hear before reconciliation can come. Many who read Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry are wondering, “How can I respond?” Paths for Peacemaking with Host Peoples is a short document intended to give people tangible ways to act and respond to some of the things learned in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry. Click here to download. Free downloadable study guide available here.

Booklist Editors’ Choice “Best Books of 2019” An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country’s agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation’s rural places and their people.

We Want Land to Live explores the current boundaries of radical approaches to food sovereignty. First coined by La Via Campesina (a global movement whose name means “the peasant’s way”), food sovereignty is a concept that expresses the universal right to food. Amy Trauger uses research combining ethnography, participant observation, field notes, and interviews to help us understand the material and definitional struggles surrounding the decommodification of food and the transformation of the global food system’s political-economic foundations. Trauger’s work is the first of its kind to analytically and coherently link a dialogue on food sovereignty with case studies illustrating the spatial and territorial strategies by which the movement fosters its life in the margins of the corporate food regime. She discusses community gardeners in Portugal; small-scale, independent farmers in Maine; Native American wild rice gatherers in Minnesota; seed library supporters in Pennsylvania; and permaculturists in Georgia. The problem in the food system, as the activists profiled here see it, is not markets or the role of governance but that the right to food is conditioned by what the state and corporations deem to be safe, legal, and profitable—and not by what eaters think is right in terms of their health, the environment, or their communities. Useful for classes on food studies and active food movements alike, We Want Land to Live makes food sovereignty issues real as it illustrates a range of methodological alternatives that are consistent with its discourse: direct action (rather than charity, market creation, or policy changes), civil disobedience (rather than compliance with discriminatory laws), and mutual aid (rather than reliance on top-down aid).

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.