Landfill

Description:

A groundbreaking new book from the author of The Running Sky and Four Fields, Landfill confronts our waste-making species through the extraordinary and fascinating life of gulls, and the people who watch them. Original, compelling and unflinching, it is the nature book for our times.

We think of gulls as pests. They steal our chips and make newspaper headlines, these animals, often derided as "bin chickens" are complex neighbours, making the most of our throw away species. In the anthropocene, they are a surprising success story. They've become intertwined with us, precisely because we are so good at making rubbish. Landfill is a book that avoids nostalgia and eulogy for nature and instead kicks beneath the littered surface to find stranger and more inspiring truths.

In Landfill, Tim Dee argues that rubbish tips can sustain life and offers an alternative view of how we should treat any animal that dares to live so closely with us.

Reviews:

“Landfill is an important and entirely brilliant book. It’s a love letter to gulls and their charged relationship with humans, but it’s also a deep meditation on difficulty and waste, on the beauty of the disregarded, and on what we make of matter out of place. There’s love and death here, fear, fascination, hope, and the breaking of the world. Dee has written an absolute triumph.” Helen Macdonald

“A startling and truly original book.” Richard Holmes

“a true zoological and anthropological classic.” Charles Foster

“In Dee’s hands, a book about gulls becomes an exploration of the anthropocene, a meditation on the taxonomic impulse and a philosophical inquiry into waste.” Melissa Harrison