Jane Hutton’s Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, is out with Routledge. I have been following Hutton’s work for a long time and I was eager to read this elaboration of her previous research on the relational political ecology of uneven material flows. Here is the summary:

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes – the material’s source and the urban site where the material ended up – together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single…