Land Marks is a story of friendship, hope, and resistance — a timely story of deep connection to place — as the call to “Drill, baby, drill!” returns and Big Oil & Gas makes big plans for all of our places.
In the river-crossed north woods of Michigan, Kate, Brett, Sonya, and Mark, mentored by their former professor Rebecca, keep watch as North American Energy (NorA) connects a corridor of frack well sites deep in the state forests. When NorA expands in unexpected directions and their bigger plan becomes clear, the action begins.
As grassroots activists prepare to stop NorA’s dangerous superfrac, stresses other than the fracturing of the bedrock appear: Sonya is arrested, Rebecca reveals her hidden past, and the one person who knows both women’s stories arrives in camp. But love and solidarity want to win—even if most showdowns with Big Oil don’t end well for those who take a stand.
Land Marks is a tribute to the waterways that connect us, the land that sustains us, and the moments that inspire us to rise up and say, “No more!”
“This book will make you feel alive. . . If ever there were a necessary book for our times, Land Marks is it. You will close this book feeling washed with elation.”
— Katy Yocom, author of Three Ways to Disappear, winner of the Siskiyou Prize for Environmental Literature
”This compelling novel gets at the emotions that undergird activism — the love, the fear, the feeling that something somehow must be done. I recognized much that was familiar, and learned much that was new.”
— Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont
”Land Marks is an important and powerful novel, and deserves its place in a growing literature of ecological resistance. Read it, and then act.”
— Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and Endgame
”Land Marks is a novel that captures the unpleasant truths of fracking through a human lens, not only breaking hearts but warming them, too.”
— Foreword Reviews
”Land Marks, Maryann Lesert’s savvy, mindful, and dramatic novel of intergenerational education and place defense, is writing as nonviolent direct action, principled and powerful.”
— Stephanie Mills, author of Tough Little Beauties and In Service of the Wild
”This polemical outing is both an elegy for ecosystems already lost and a call to action.”
— Publishers Weekly
”May this story inspire us to pause when we turn on our gas furnace, stove, water heater, and to ponder alternatives. For tragically, this book is even more timely today than when it was selected as a 2021 Finalist for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature.”
— Gail Collins-Ranadive, author of Dinosaur Dreaming, Our Climate Moment.
”Maryann Lesert deftly weaves compelling characters and lyrical descriptions of land and water with an urgent plea for the protection of Earth while there is still time. This outstanding novel is about our common fight for the natural places and systems we hold dear, but it is also about our society’s soul.”
— Liz Kirkwood, Executive Director of FLOW (For Love of Water)
A real-life common ground gathering of everyday people and grassroots groups stopped fracking in our forests once before.
We can do it again.