Five Bay Landscapes

In their engaging accounts of shoreline explorations from Lake Superior to Lake Ontario, Karen Lutsky and Sean Burkholder reveal how local circumstances shed light on the complexities and contradictions of North America’s largest freshwater ecosystem. As they go, they pose urgent and timely questions about the capitalist and colonial regimes that have transformed the region—and offer alternative ways of valuing, imagining, and sustaining its extraordinary landscapes. This is important reading for anyone with an interest in the Great Lakes.

Five Bay Landscapes, by two critical thinkers about landscape and place, explores thick and complex narratives on the landscapes of the coastal zone of the Great Lakes. The collected essays challenge readers to think beyond the ideas of design or planning as solving problems or fixing sites, and to interrogate truths that we think we know and the tools and methods we think we understand so we can know more about how to do better. The essays are simultaneously specific in their place-based framing while describing questions that face us locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally. In this the volume is an argument for the productive understanding of places in their complexity and messiness as a way into a more ideal future.