2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Award Winner Rosetta S. Elkin Gives Lecture on Landscapes of Retreat

Rosetta S. Elkin introduced the packed University of Virginia audience to a revolutionary perspective on how landscapes speak to us in this period of climate crisis, requiring us to listen to them, should we want to survive and equitably thrive. In her lecture on her award-winning work, Elkin advised that we find the answers to our planetary survival in diverse locales and, echoing emergent strategy, in the small things. She reasoned that we must embrace an amendatory practice that involves amending the soil, taking what is available, adjusting to new growth, and engaging with the land before retreat.  

Elkin maintains that the way to honor the land is to tend to the land left behind after disasters. Continuing to “tend it,” honoring it through communal naming, rituals, and ceremony and establishing strong connection to the land’s past are examples of narratives of retreat that can support communities developing new, just climate futures based on bottom-up social organization rather than policy alone.