When I was doing marketing for real estate agents I had a spreadsheet of quotes about land and real estate. There are a lot of them, most speaking to the value of land as an investment and as a way for an individual to obtain agency over their own financial future.
In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, Michael Albertus takes us from the founding of nation-states and the first boundaries around land to colonization and land reshuffling and then to land reforms and the efforts by many nations to right past racial and gender-driven injustices.
Mike and I talked about his research and dipped into climate change, agriculture, housing, natural resources and much more. This book gave me much to contemplate about the uses and abuses of land and why we never seem to learn the lessons of those who walked these places before we did. Land is power, it’s agency, and it’s hope. Hope that we can build a good life.
This interview was done as part of the New Books Network, a fantastic podcast platform that features dozens of author interviews with leading academics and thoughtleaders each week.
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