This work reveals the uses and abuses of the Truckee River and documents the continual debates over its distribution to meet diverse demands, ultimately asking the question of what will happen to the rapidly dwindling water supply of the arid West?

In order to accept the enormous responsibility that comes of being in the world, we must first conceive, in spite of all the obstacles, the state of actually being the world. It is for this reason that John R. Campbell came to the Klamath marshes, a wetland in southern Oregon formed by three ancient, shallow lakes, a vast emptiness that is paradoxically home to an amazing diversity of life, of untold thousands of birds both migratory and resident, of all the interconnected life forms that make up one of North America's richest natural environments. Absence and Light is Campbell's account of...

Acclaimed nature writer Linda M. Hasselstrom sees herself as a rancher who writes - a self-definition that shapes the tone and content of her writing. Now owner of the cattle ranch where she grew up in western South Dakota, she lives in daily intimate contact with the natural world. As she says, Nature is to me both home and office. Nature is my boss, manager of the branch office - or ranch office - where I toil to convert native grass into meat....If I want to keep my job as well as my home, I pay attention not only to Nature's orders, but to her moods and whims. The essays in this book...

Writer-poet William L. Fox has spent much of his career contemplating the complex ways that landscape, human cognition, and history collide to create our perceptions and treatment of place. In Playa Works, Fox considers the West's emptiest spaces - the playas, or dry beds, of the ancient lakes that once filled much of the Great Basin. Among the flattest, most barren places on the planet, the West's playas have haunted the American imagination since the Fremont expedition first surveyed them in the early nineteenth century. In these eight brilliant essays, Fox explores many of the major playas...

Place is not only a metaphor for the self; it can be the self objectified, including the self of years ago. So writes Catharine Savage Brosman, who explores the places of her own life in Finding Higher Ground. The tour, for the reader, is one of delight and wonder. Brosman's places range from the West Texas desert of her girlhood to a chilly flat in the north of England; from the flooded streets of New Orleans to the sublimities of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Even as her meditations reflect on her connections to these places and the ways they have shaped her life, they also examine the...

Combining environmental history, personal memoir and a view on the complicated relationship between humans and the landscapes they destroy by loving them too much, this book is a warning beacon highlighting how it is that a lifestyle, however alluring, can be made precarious by the very natural forces that creates its charm. This diary is a provocative exploration of the tenuous interface between the urban and wild worlds, and of the nature of community in an increasingly profit-oriented society.