Steven Stoll – författare

A sweeping meditation on the historical relationship between humans and land that challenges us to rethink common beliefsLand is the natural environment that humans have defined, shaped, and endlessly reinvented. In this lyrical narrative, Steven Stoll explores ways of thinking about land through social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological lenses.Stoll tells the stories of the first Sumerian farmers, the medieval commons, the origins of private property in seventeenth-century England, the politics of colonization in what became Pennsylvania, strip mining in West Virginia, and the relationship between race and land reform in the twentieth century, as well as of a map drawn at the end of the Ice Age. Moving deftly from anthropology to biblical analysis, from the Doctrine of Discovery to the American civil rights movement, he reveals the philosophical underpinnings of our relationship to land, upending many of our assumptions.In situating contemporary views of land within the longer arc of human history, Stoll argues that many of the virtues found in older forms of land have been lost in the turn away from territoriality and commons, and toward commodification and private property. Rethinking the past, Stoll maintains, can open the future to the old and new and to the possibility of reform.

The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nation's leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California. Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it. Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.