Land: a history of belonging and value
- Manchester University Press (World English)
Humans have lived symbiotically with the land (and sea) since their emergence as a species. The land has given us shelter and sustenance, solace and inspiration: it has kept us alive, spiritually as well as materially. It has also troubled us in myriad ways: crops have failed, climates changed, meanings shifted. We have exploited and cooperated with it, contemplated and despoiled it, settled and abandoned it. But the land has always been part of human life, and humans part of the landscape.
This book will explore a variety of landscapes, a variety of relationships between humans, other animals, and their surroundings. It starts in Spain, the author’s native land, moving across its diverse terrains and communities, from a dehesa in Andalucia to a pico in Asturias. And it continues into his adopted English-speaking world, working across American, Australian and British landscapes by way of contrast and comparison, probing and imagining. In walking, thinking and speaking with other humans about the lands they inhabit, Land carries a set of questions about how humans live in their landscapes, and arrives at some answers both new and old. It is not a polemic, but perhaps the necessary preparatory preface to one.
Rogelio’s subtle, sinuous, elastic English prose is a match for the flora and fauna he meets on his odyssey. Its clarity and beauty permits his reader to enter further and deeper into the exposed strata of our immemorial presence on this planet.
'Challenging, interesting, resonant: the story of Rogelio's own land and its history allows him to open onto much bigger, urgent questions about our relationship with place and belonging.’
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places and Professor of Literature & the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge
‘Luque-Lora is a sensitive guide to the crucial and urgent issue of Spain's ecological crisis and he weaves into that the histories of how the land has been used and loved. We need these thoughtful mappings of our homelands across the world as it faces climate and biodiversity crises.’
Madeleine Bunting, author of Love of Country and The Plot