This Land Is Your Land?

Land in America: Its Value, Use, and Control By Peter Wolf Pantheon Books, 592 pp., $20 The fragmentary view of the citizen, even the insight of the poet, will not deliver to us entire the panorama of civilization. The devout conservationist shucks his Earth Shoes and stays at home to munch alfalfa sprouts and peruse the prose of John Muir: he can’t be bothered to attend the latest tedious meeting of the local zoning board. Similarly, your basic Rotarian’s view of events is a narrow one: often unhistorical, unduly optimistic, and never binocular. The future is created while those most concerned (the citizenry) look the other way.

Peter Wolf—chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, adjunct professor at the School of Architecture of Cooper Union, and planning consultant to government, corporations, and individuals—does not look the other way. What he sees he tells us in Land in America.

JT

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J. O. Tate

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Land in America: Its Value, Use, and Control By Peter Wolf Pantheon Books, 592 pp., $20 The fragmentary view of the citizen, even the insight of the poet, will not deliver to us entire the panorama of civilization. The devout conservationist shucks his Earth Shoes and stays at home to munch alfalfa sprouts and peruse the prose of John Muir: he can’t be bothered to attend the latest tedious meeting of the local zoning board. Similarly, your basic Rotarian’s view of events is a narrow one: often unhistorical, unduly optimistic, and never binocular. The future is created while those most concerned (the citizenry) look the other way.

Peter Wolf—chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, adjunct professor at the School of Architecture of Cooper Union, and planning consultant to government, corporations, and individuals—does not look the other way. What he sees he tells us in Land in America.