Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams could write a grocery list that speaks truth to power. In this new collection of essays from one of America’s most devoted defenders of public lands, she examines the nature of erosion—on our riverbanks and desert mesas, but also on us. Is it destruction or metamorphosis when we’re shaped by the elements of wind and fire, time and truth? And what of democracy, weathered by storms? In these stories, we visit with the native peoples of Bears Ears National Monument, the owls that swoop by Williams’s porch, and protestors, politicians, and prairie dogs—singular characters, all. We consider policy and spirituality, the suicide of a brother, the rockslides of desecration. But even through the despair, these essays rise to a hymn, a summons to howl. Erosion is a tonic, like the landscape of the Colorado Plateau, of which Williams says: “One drinks deeply from this well-spring of wonder, especially in drought.”

Williams visits twelve national parks and writes about each one as a meditation on American identity, public land, and what we choose to preserve. Personal, political, and unapologetically in love with the idea of public wilderness.