The program is read by the author.

Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from a significant and beloved article writer and conservationist

Terry Tempest Williams is one of our most impassioned defenders of open public lands. A naturalist, fervent activist, and stirring article writer, she’s spoken to us and for all of us in books like The Hour of Property: A Personal Topography of America’s Country wide Parks and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family members and Place. In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of about Erosion: Essays of Undoing the land, of the personal, of perception, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What’s weathered, put on, and whittled apart through wind, drinking water, and time is as effective as what continues to be. Our undoing can be our becoming.

She looks at the existing state of American politics: the dire social and environmental implications of recent choices to gut Bears Ears National Monument, sacred lands to Local Folks of the American Southwest, and undermine the Endangered Types Action. She testifies that weather change isn’t an abstraction, citing the drought outside her door and sometimes, within herself. Pictures of extraction and contaminants haunt her: “essential oil rigs smoking cigarettes the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste on dirt highways today crisscrossing the desert like an open nervous program.” But beautiful moments of alleviation and refuge, solace and spirituality come-in her conversations with Navajo elders, artwork, and, always, in the property itself. She asks, urgently: “Is definitely Earth not enough? Can the desert be a prayer?”