In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains,...

**"Sharp as the needles on a pinyon pine, these essays will make you rethink your view of the American West. Meloy's wise and unexpected observations are a pure delight."—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNEThe late writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy wrote and recorded a series of audio essays** for KUER, NPR Utah in the 1990s. Every few months, she would travel to their Salt Lake City studios from her red rock home of Bluff to read an essay or two. With understated humor and sh...

Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and p...

From the award-winning author Eating Stone . "A painful juxtaposition of natural beauty and warrior wastelands." — The New York Times Book ReviewFeeling disconnected from the wildly beautiful desert that she has known intimately for twenty years, award-winning writer Ellen Meloy embarks on a search for home that is historical, scientific, and spiritual. Her "Map of the Known Universe," devised to...

In Sandstone Seduction, Katie Lee collects her most creative writing, written over her lifetime, telling us about the events that shaped her life, and her encounters with water and rock. As always, her writing is deeply personal, remarkably candid, and abundantly frank. Katie Lee speaks her mind; she does not hold back. She listened to the water and absorbed its lessons for more than sixty years; she knows well that we have a lot to learn about the flow of our lives.

Writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy and photographer Stephen Strom met in the fall of 2004 and began planning a collaborative book of images and prose expressing their shared love of the desert. Two months later, Meloy died suddenly at her home in southern Utah. Over the years to follow, Strom called on Meloy's writing to put his new photographs to words. The collaboration seemed to deepen over time, and it comes to fruition in This Desert Hides Nothing.

National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez explores the challenges and joys of the human experience through the frame of the natural world in fourteen arresting and extraordinary essays.In Crossing Open Ground, award-winning literary writer Barry Lopez offers prescient, beautiful, and thought-provoking reflections on how the natural world can define and illuminate our sense of self. Whether he's traversing the Arctic tundra or the deserts of the Americ...

One of Vox’s Most Important Books of the DecadeNew York Times Editors' Choice 2017Forbes Top 10 Best Environment, Climate, and Conservation Book of 2017As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass e...

This memoir of life in the American desert by the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a nature writing classic on par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey recounts his many escapades, adventures, and epiphanies as an Arches National Park ranger outside Moab, Utah. Brimming with arresting insights, impassioned arguments for wilderness conservation, and a raconteur's wit, it is one of Abbey's most critically ...

New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award • Winner of the Saroyan International Prize for Writing • Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award • “The best outdoors book of the year.” —Sierra ClubFrom a talent who’s been compared to Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, David Quammen, and Jared Diamond, On Trails is a wondrous exploration of how trails help us understand the world—from invisible ...

Most books about the environment build on dire threats warning of the possible extinction of humanity. Alan Weisman avoids frightening off readers by disarmingly wiping out our species in the first few pages of this remarkable book. He then continues with an astounding depiction of how Earth will fare once we’re no longer around.The World Without Us is a one-of-a-kind book that sweeps through time from the moment of humanity’s future extinction to millions of years into th...

WINNER OF THE 2018 JOHN BURROUGHS MEDAL FOR OUTSTANDING NATURAL HISTORY WRITING“Both a love song to trees, an exploration of their biology, and a wonderfully philosophical analysis of their role they play in human history and in modern culture.” —Science FridayThe author of Sounds Wild and Broken and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen visits with nature’s most magnificent networkers — trees...