These class conflicts, indicative of “the national blue-red divide,” can “make local politics almost violent,” she writes. “The farmer who hopes to make some money off his land by developing it, working-class families who have seen employment shrink to nearly nothing but have been offered a meaningful sum by a fracking company — such people see landscape preservationists, like environmentalists, as the enemy.”

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“I see that I myself am a part of that,” she acknowledges, recounting a meeting with a deputy sheriff and a garbage collector from where she lives in the country who both farm on the side because — “well, it’s hard to say why,” she writes. “They just do,” suggesting to her that they care at least as much about the landscape as the preservationists and second-home owners do. The truth in many poor areas, which I’m not sure Lessard fully addresses, is that people also farm for food. Any conclusion “about class and landscape,” she decides, will “be contradicted, maybe within minutes.”

But she doesn’t leave it there. The environmental movement, she notes, born during the era of the moonshot, when earthlings first saw the planet as it is — a tiny, vulnerable blue marble dangling in the abyss of space — disastrously ignored the implications of those images by pitting people against nature and failing to seek common ground with urbanists, pacifists and social justice advocates.

“We can see clearly today that, from the point of view of the moon, the distinction between city and country of any kind, or even city and ‘wilderness’ was meaningless: that it was all our ‘environment.’”

This is a familiar but timely point. Our siloed interests have thwarted collective progress. Crumbling infrastructure and runaway housing prices are ultimately inseparable from sprawl and pollution; climate change accelerates rural desertification and contributes to flooding, wreaking havoc on billions of lives, causing unrest and fueling the refugee crisis. We separate such issues at our peril.

Lessard laments that American students, intent on business careers, are not more interested in these things, that they eschew social activism today, a fogyish plaint that seems the exact opposite of true. I wondered how many of them she had interviewed for the book.

I found myself wishing for the voices of more local residents when she was on her jaunts into what appeared to her to be the haphazard zones of atopia and on the outskirts of troubled cities that to her seemed “the middle of nowhere.” Surely these places aren’t nowhere to all the people who live there.