Erosion: Essays of Undoing Audiobook (Free)

This program is read by the author.

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

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

She talks about the existing state of American politics: the dire social and environmental implications of recent choices to gut Bears Ears Country wide Monument, sacred lands to Local People of the American Southwest, and undermine the Endangered Types Action. She testifies that climate change is not an abstraction, citing the drought outside her door and sometimes, within herself. Pictures of extraction and contamination haunt her: “oil rigs smoking cigarettes the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste materials on dirt highways now crisscrossing the desert like an exposed nervous program.” But beautiful moments of comfort and refuge, solace and spirituality come-in her conversations with Navajo elders, artwork, and, usually, in the property itself. She asks, urgently: “Can be Earth not enough? Can the desert be a prayer?”