A collection of personal essays, narratives, and meditations which explore the people, myths, legends, and biogeography of the American Southwest

From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human.

Among the steep cliffs of Utahs canyonlands a band of rare desert bighorn sheep simply vanished. Although the word "extinct" was bandied about, their passing seemed to fit the downward spiral of native wildlife in the Southwest that began in the early twentieth century. Remote, isolated, and elusive, this band slipped through the cracks. The bighorns were gone. Then they came back. We have allowed ourselves few places and scant ways to witness other...

"The Ecology of Herbal Medicine introduces botanical medicine through an in-depth exploration of the land, presenting a unique guide to plants found across the American Southwest. An accomplished herbalist and geographer, Dara Saville offers readers an ecological manual for developing relationships with the land and plants in a new theoretical approach to using herbal medicines. Designed to increase our understanding of plants' rapport with their...

Craig Childs, a naturalist and river guide, explores the appearances of water in the Arizona deserts, including underground rivers, flash floods, night rivers, and hidden lakes.

A Pagan Polemic curates the evolving perspective of Jack Loeffler--itinerant wanderer, environmental warrior, storyteller, and story collector--whose true education began when he was marched into the Nevada desert one day at dawn to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever" during an atomic bomb test a scant few miles away. Since that day in 1957, Jack's mission in life has been to record peoples of the borderlands and to bring "indigenous mindedness"...