Erosion
Essays of Undoing
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist
In Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: "How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?"
We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument—sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which "oil rigs light up the horizon." And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.
These essays are Williams's call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory—emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.
Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a collection of passionate, galvanizing essays (many previously published), activist and teacher Williams (The Hour of Land) shares her intimate connection to the as-yet untamed landscapes of the American West. She celebrates the millions of acres of wilderness protected as public land both as a bulwark against environmental disaster and as "a stay against insanity" during troubled times. She explores politics the impact of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Wilderness Act of 1964 and her own personal encounters with nature, such as the sandhill cranes she witnesses "flying above the Platte in all directions... crisscrossing each other like long undulating strands of calligraphy." Several essays focus on the fight for Bears Ears National Monument, a site Native Americans hold sacred, now doomed to a severe reduction in size by a Trump executive order. Speaking out strongly against drilling on public lands, Williams describes how she and her husband leased 1,120 acres of Utah land in order to preserve it. Despite the potential for despair, however, Williams writes with a poetic optimism. "We need not lose hope, we just need to locate where it dwells," she insists, and one of those places is in Williams's own writing, as demonstrated in this stirring collection.
