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Sign up todayLandfill
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Learn moreOver 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. Weāve 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.Ā
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.Ā
Tim Dee is a radio producer, television broadcaster, acclaimed author of Four Fields and The Running Sky, and editor of the anthology Ground Work.
Tim Dee is a radio producer, television broadcaster, acclaimed author of Four Fields and The Running Sky, and editor of the anthology Ground Work.
Reviews
āThe British literature of birds that includes Gilbert White with his swifts and martins, Helen Macdonald with her hawks, is a rich one. But Tim Deeās own obsession with gulls also leads him to contemplate the landfills over which they often preside and the alarming changes to our landscapes with which they are associated. His alertness to factors in ecological health results not in a jeremiad, however, but instead in an exploration of surprising parallels between evolution in the biological realm and the slow siftings of memory and culture. Landfill is a remarkably venturesome, robustly voiced, and illuminating book.āāJohn Elder, author ofĀ Reading the Mountains of Home
āLandfill is an important and entirely brilliant book. Itās a love letter to gulls and their charged relationship with humans, but itās also a deep meditation on difficulty and waste, on the beauty of the disregarded, and on what we make of matter out of place. Thereās love and death here, fear, fascination, hope, and the breaking of the world. Dee has written an absolute triumph.āāHelen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
āLike coyotes, ravens, raccoons, and other resourceful urban wildlife, gulls frequently face our scorn, and sometimes our bullets. In his delightful jaunt through gull taxonomy, behavior, and lore, Tim Dee casts his feathered protagonists as indomitable heroes of the Anthropoceneāthriving in our cities, colonizing our culture, and repurposing our trash as treasure. Next time a gull snatches your fries, youāll find yourself not cursing a petty thief, but admiring one of our planetās grittiest, savviest survivors.āāBen Goldfarb, author of Eager
āTim Deeās restive and gorgeous prose pulls readers into the wilds of the modern urban landscape, where gulls and humans wander side-by-side with ancient poets, Victorian novelists, and Madagascar nighthawks. In this small book Dee asksāand beautifully begins to answerāone of the largest questions of our time: How do we live with attentive grace and wisdom alongside the varied coinhabitants of our imperiled, complex, and beloved earth?āāLyandaĀ LynnĀ Haupt, author ofĀ Mozartās StarlingĀ andĀ Crow Planet
āEvolution is fluid, and the urban gulls of Tim Deeās Landfill embody this ever-changing world in action. Tracking difficult-to-categorize gulls and the people who know their habits best, Dee alerts us to the heavy-laden meanings we lay on the wings of others, even as he revels the ways in which gulls continue to fly beyond our grasp. Familiarity need not breed contempt. As Dee shows, it can breed fascination.āāGavin Van Horn, author ofĀ The Way of Coyote
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