Pre-order your copy of Landscapes of Retreat, now in its second printing (the first edition SOLD OUT fast) and has recently won the 2024 UVA Center for Cultural LandscapesJB Jackson Book Prize. Once your order is placed, we will contact you when the copies arrive in February 2025.
 
Landscapes of Retreat are portraits of climate adaptation. Retreat is found in the land that is left behind as settlement patterns shift due to a changing climate. The term landscape refers to the earth animated by the aliveness of creatures and organisms, and the term retreat suggests that human patterns are not fixed but might also be enlivened. Taken together, the stories in this book suggest that communities are more likely to adapt to change when the landscape is appreciated, so that retreat can be valued. The results cutacross history, fieldwork, citizenship, and geography in order to rethink and rework “change” as a means toward shared climate futures.
 
Author Rosetta S. Elkin (Canadian, American) is Principal Practice Landscape Associate Professor and Program Director of the newly established MLA program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Elkin’s work examines plant life at the intersection of art, design and ecology. In particular, her research attends to biological complexity as a neglected aspect of ecosystem integrity and recovery by exploring concealed the characteristics of non-human behavior. Elkin’s practice prioritizes public exhibitions, open access publishing, and collaborative research to promote a more thoughtful and accountable design agenda. As a designer and a scholar, her work experiments with the ways in which we compose our worlds, blurring the traditional boundaries between research and practice.