Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder [Paperback]

Ranging across two centuries of American history,Crossing Great Dividesargues that the habit of construing city and country as opposites is at the root of our current environmental and political disorder. This oversimplifying dualism has distorted how we planned cities, our patterns of production and consumption, how we deal with waste, and how urban and rural populations perceive each other.

Conventional urban environmental reform has made modern city life possible, but it has done little to limit the despoliation of distant places. Nevertheless, the successes of urban environmental reform remind us of what is possible.

John Fairfield concludes with a case study of Phoenix, Arizona to demonstrate this dysfunctional relationship between city and country while developing a sympathetic critique of the Green New Deal. He suggests how we might bridge the “great divide” as we face the daunting challenges the twenty-first century is pressing upon us.

[A]n exhaustive interdisciplinary synthesis spanning history, sociology, environmental science, philosophy, and literature. In doing so, he delivers an impressive dissection of the urban-rural divide in the United States and provides useful insights into how we can begin to dismantle it.... Particularly salient is Fairfields examination of urban-rural interdependence.... Fairfield delivers an important contribution to the soft underbelly of todays political ecology.... Fairfields masterful synthesis provides scholars working at the intersections of agricultural, environmental, and rural history with a useful resource. For these reasons,Crossing Great Dividesis a must-read. Agricultural History

[T]his is a useful work for its (re)introduction to many of us of John Deweys Pragmatism with its emphasis on intellect and experience conjoined with an appreciation of the contingency of knowing, and for Fairfields insistence that we live in a world oló)