By the time you finish Neil Hamilton’s new book, “The Land Remains,” which is written partly in the voice of 40 acres of Iowa farmland, you realize you’ve read a love story.
An unconventional one, to be sure. This love isn't romantic, it's primal: love for the earth, the soil buried below our homes, highways and food supplies, the ground beneath our feet. Literally, the foundation on which we all exist.
And in the same way that love can be fiercely protective, Hamilton pulls no punches in warning of how the land has become endangered. Overbuilt, overfertilized, subjected to greedy developers and poachers and giant commercial, often out-of-state agricultural interests, it has become an unwitting battleground. The chemicals pumped into crops to make them bigger can pollute the water and erode the topsoil. The resulting erosion and losses morph into political and economic conflicts over "eminent domain," ethanol mandates, carbon pipelines and ultimately, climate change and humans' roles in it.
