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Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her: "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." Fans of Williams's iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was a member of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

It is an extraordinary time. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have propelled us all into a new cycle of our personal, national, and global lives. It will never be the same. There is no "normal" to get back to. Life is in this country is changed forever, and it seems clear that we have entered an era in which new questions need to be asked, because there are no easy answers or quick fixes.

“Williams is a master…She gives us a reason to follow her example: refusing to look away from the degradation, in hopes of preserving the wild places we have left.” —Outside Magazine From the acclaimed nature writer and New York Times bestselling author, a revelatory work of narrative...