National park enthusiasts will likely be familiar with the writing of Terry Tempest Williams. Her previous book The Hour of Land told national park stories as only she, in her lyrical, insightful, and emotional way, can tell them. Erosion is not explicitly about national parks, though some of the essays lament what has happened to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monuments. She has already addressed the challenges of many other parks in that earlier work. The 32 pieces in this book, most of them essays, address a “world being torn to pieces,” being eroded, a condition that brings Williams, at times, to heartbreak.
The scope and diversity of the pieces in this book make it a difficult book to describe, but quoting her preface seems a good place to start.
This is a gathering of stories, poems, and pleas in the name of Beauty in an erosional landscape sculpted by wind, water, and time. It is also a book of questions. Whom do we serve? How do we survive our grief in the midst of so many losses in the living world, from white bark pines to grizzly bears, to the decline of willow flycatchers along the Colorado River? How do we hold ourselves to account over our inescapable complicity in a fossil fuel economy that is contributing to climate change, as well as ravaging tribal and public lands in the American West? What are the necessary actions we can take in order to realize justice for all? And how do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?
Terry Tempest Williams’ writing always raises difficult questions, presents quandaries, expresses and evokes emotion related directly or indirectly to human relations to and erosion of the natural world, even to erosion of the self. She doesn’t have answers to all the questions she raises, but she insists they must be raised, no matter how difficult it may be to do so.
Gazing through her metaphorical lens she finds erosion all around her, in her beloved desert landscapes beset by politics and development, in her personal life with the loss of her brother to suicide, in the plight of pronghorn and other migratory wildlife blocked by roads and oil and gas development among other obstacles, in her professional life, fired by her university for the publicly defiant act of buying two oil and gas leases near Arches National Park and in critical sage grouse habitat, with no intention of developing them. University administrators denied her threatened termination had anything to do with this act, but she knew better. She writes:
Here is what I have learned: my leaving the University of Utah, whether I was basically fired or chose to resign, is not the essential story, but the one that leads up to it. The bigger story I wish to tell you isn’t about the cowardice of institutions or my unwillingness to conform; the story I am grappling with and trying to understand now is the story of change and the unraveling of the self, my self. I wish this were a story about wisdom. I believe it is, instead, a story about disruption and failure.
At the Needles Overlook in Canyonlands, she reflects that once she could not have imagined “the way this landscape fuels the fury and passion of engaged students and inspires them to make beautiful, radical change in the world, which is what I think many institutions fear most. Weathering breaks things down. Erosion carries them away.” Terry is always teaching, whether in her writing or out with students. Teaching is an antidote to “failure” of actions like that which ended her tenure at the University of Utah.
All in Erosion is not bad news and anguish, though there is plenty of that. She takes heart from the example of the Wilderness Act, product of hard, persistent work by many, more successful than its advocates deemed possible.
“Conservation,” she writes, “is a prayer and a practice for the life that is to come.”
Fifty-six years after the Act, prayers have been answered. There is the Endangered Species Act, beset though it may be today, “both a policy and a prayer,” embracing what Albert Schweitzer called “Reverence for Life.”
Terry finds other teaching venues, as Writer in Residence at the University of Wyoming, collaborating with students and artists on a project they call The Council of Pronghorns, and at the Harvard Divinity School. She describes a transformative experience in China on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Ayang Bai devoted to the Devine Feminine. She realizes that the Devine Feminine “is not a mystical presence outside us, but an embodied presence within us made of flesh and bones, xylem and phloem, fur and scales, inhabiting every inch of this planet we call home.”
The lessons are that “Humility is the way. Evolution is the path. Revolution is coming as our wellspring of desires finally meets Earth on its own geologic terms. We are eroding. We are evolving. This is my mantra.” Her belief is eroding, as a Mormon and a citizen, but she concludes that this erosion is asking her “to let go of what is comfortable, the familiar, and be open to possibilities that I haven’t dared to consider, even the acceptance and devotion to other gods outside of my own image, no matter how dangerous.” As she has in earlier works, she tells us that “We can begin to tell our own stories of crucifixion and resurrection.”
I and many readers go to works by Terry Tempest Williams for the beauty of her writing, to be rallied to defend the American West, to revel in her stories, and be provoked by the insights and the angst she expresses. Devotees of her writing will find many familiar themes and ideas here and be inspired to self-examination and action to counter the erosion she describes. What is new here, in my view, is the way she weaves together, using the metaphor of erosion, diverse threats to self, society, land, and Nature that we face in the American West, the United States, and the world.
She concludes with hope, with an uplifting story of the restoration of the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. The great trees were suffocating from trampling, erosion, and other assaults, and were speaking of it, in their fashion, to Sue Beatty, an attentive park biologist, who heard them. Beatty and her Park Service team organized a restoration project, got the go-ahead from NPS leadership, and launched a forty-million dollar effort, much of the funding donated, that “changed the landscape on behalf of the Big Trees.” Listening to the Big Trees is a “Liturgy of Home” to Williams, and she quotes the Buddha in closing her essay.
There is only one moment in time
When it is essential to awaken
That moment is now.
“This does not require belief,” she writes, “it requires engagement.”
“How serious are we?”
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