Book: Heart of the Land

Essays on Last Great Places edited by Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman of The Nature Conservancy.

Introduction by Barry Lopez

Terry Tempest Williams
Rick Bass - I loved this remembrance about the Hill country of Texas. One vignette tells of geese getting lost in fog one winter night and "honking and flying in circles, not a hundred foot over our heads. I'm sure they could hear the gurgle of the creek below. I stared up into the fog, expecting to see the first brave goose come slipping down through that fog, wings set in a glide of faith for the water it knew was just below. They were so close to it."

Bill McKibben

David James Duncan - Stillwater Marsh and Pyramid Lake, Nevada

Joel Achenbach
Thomas McGuane

William W. Warner - A lovely essay on the Atlantic Barrier Islands of Virginia, full of water and birds and sand and salt marshes.

Carl Hiaasen

Gioconda Belli - A trip into the jungles of Belize

Gary Paul Nabhan
Linda Hogan

Teresa Jordan - "We have come to this spot in the Flint Hills of northern Oklahoma to watch [bison] released onto 5,000 acres of native tall grass prairie."

William Kittredge - I've always liked reading Kittredge when he talks about growing up on a ranch in southeastern Oregon. His essay is an apology for what his family did to the land. "We need to give some time to the arts of cherishing the things we adore, before they simply vanish. Maybe it will be like learning a skill: how to live in paradise."

James Welch - Welch writes about the Rocky Mountain Front, one of the most beautiful places I've seen.

Jim Harrison
Louise Erdrich

Ann Zwinger - Zwinger writes an evocative essay about 78-mile long Darby creek in southeastern Ohio. "Yellow moneywort weaves through the base of grasses and herbs, waxy five-petaled yellow flowers the size of a quarter named, I assume, because they look like gold coins scattered in the the grass...The buzzing of summer's cicadas vibrates the air…a huge yellow and black bumblebee….a mourning dove…"

Philip Caputo - For Faith: Caputo writes of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. (I'll be mourning vicariously with you this weekend…"

Jill Nelson - A short piece about Block Island "12 miles off the coast of Rhode Island."

John Jerome - Central Florida: "February nights are long, but a full moon lit the scrub so brightly that the difference between twilight and midnight was not of order but of degree." The Florida Scrub Jay lives here in central Florida in an ecosystem dependent on periodic burning. "Understanding scrub requires information, detail, background--a kind of hands-and-knees biology, or what one researcher like to call 'an elfin point of view.'"

Pam Houston
Annick Smith

Victor Perera - Guatemala in The Quetzel, the Parakeet, and the Jaguar.

Dorothy Allison
William Least Heat-Moon

Charles Wilkinson - My favorite in this book, as Wilkinson recounts another tale of our government's disgraceful behavior towards Native Americans, in this instance, the Utes of northern Colorado in the mid-19th century.

Homero Aridjis

Paul Theroux - Theroux never disappoints. His contribution here is about the Rock Islands of Palau, Micronesia. "They [non-poisonous jellyfish] were so thick in the water that they softly crowded me and slid against my face and arms--my whole body. I found this a truly disgusting swim." Honestly and sadly he notes that "It is paradise to me, but it would be wrong to portray it as unviolated."

Peter Matthiessen

Barbara Kingsolver - Barbara and her daughter, Camille mosey along Horse Lick Creek in Kentucky and she talks about how her "parents taught me this--to gasp, and feel lucky. They gave me the gift of making mountains out of nature's exquisite molehills."