Winner of the 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Award

Landscapes of Retreat offers a series of vivid, grounded portraits of climate adaptation. Here, “retreat” is not framed as defeat, but as a relational gesture—found in the shifting contours of land left behind as human settlement patterns change in response to a warming world. The “landscape” is understood not as passive terrain, but as living ground: animated by organisms, shaped by histories, and entwined with the lives of those who inhabit it.

Through in-depth fieldwork in places as varied as Nijinomatsubara Forest in Japan, the Maule River in Chile, Niugtaq Village in Alaska, Langtang Park in Nepal, and the Gaspésie Peninsula in Québec, the book explores how different communities face the need to move, adjust, or let go—often in dialogue with the more-than-human world around them. These stories show that climate adaptation is most resilient when landscapes are not simply sites of extraction or loss, but sources of meaning, memory, and care.

Crossing lines between geography, history, anthropology, and environmental humanities, Landscapes of Retreat reframes “retreat” as a dynamic practice—one that invites us to rethink change not as surrender, but as a way toward more livable, shared climate futures.

In 2024, Landscapes of Retreat was honored with the prestigious  2024 J.B. Jackson Book Award from the Landscape Studies Initiative at the University of Virginia. The jury—Kenneth Helphand, Sarah Lopez, and Beth Meyer—unanimously praised the book for its original and boundary-crossing contributions to landscape studies. We’re proud to have developed this remarkable project in close collaboration with author Rosetta S. Elkin.

“In Landscapes of Retreat, Rosetta S. Elkin shares varied lessons from the multi­generational lived experiences of Indigenous communities in changing landscapes across several continents. In doing so, she offers a hopeful perspective on retreat as a mode of climate adaptation—a cultural practice of living with, not against, the more than human world. The J.B. Jackson Prize jury was unanimous in our selection; we offer the highest praise for this book and its author, a scholar of rare honesty, transparency, and vulnerability whose account of her research methods is as fascinating as the subject of her book.”

— Elizabeth Meyer, Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia & Chair of the J.B. Jackson Prize Jury, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes

The paper edition is accompanied by a free digital publication at LandscapesofRetreat.com.

Rosetta S. Elkin is Associate Professor and Academic Director of Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute, Principal of Practice Landscape and Research Associate at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She is author of Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation and Tiny Taxonomy: Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture.