Landfill

Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Over the past hundred years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; ocean-going aliens, not refugees. They are too big for the world they have entered. Their story is our story too. 

Landfill is the original and compelling story of how in the Anthropocene we have learned about the natural world, named and catalogued it, and then colonized it, planted it, or filled it with our junk. While most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, hiding away from us, some vanishing forever, gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world. For these reasons Landfill is the nature book for our times, groundbreaking and genre-bending. Without nostalgia or eulogy, it kicks beneath the littered surface of the things to discover stranger truths. 

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Reviews and Praise

  • Landfill is an erudite meditation on these former seabirds — in literature, science and culture — and their symbiotic relationship with us within the natural world."Toronto Star 


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About The Author


About Tim Dee

Tim Dee is a radio producer, television broadcaster, acclaimed author of Four Fields and The Running Sky, and editor of the anthology Ground Work.

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Books By Tim Dee

Pages:240 pages
Book Art:Black-and-white illustrations throughout
Size: 5.25 x 7.25 inch
Publisher:Chelsea Green Publishing
US Pub. Date: March 12, 2019
Hardcover: 9781603589093

Available In/Retail Price

Hardcover, 240 pages, $25USD