Getting over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest

Rating:
Summary: It was worth the wait
Review: Thanks to The Univ. Of Arizona Press the long-awaited anthology of contemporary writing abouth the southwestern desert is finally available. While not the first anthology of this awesome area it is the first in over a decade to feature the best efforts of over 50 new generation contemporary writers that see the area through other than green-colored glasses. The region known as the "southwest" is, and has historically been,difficult too precisely define. From the time of John Wesley Powell to the present scholars and writers have struggled to define the region geographically. To paraphrase author Anthony DePalma, "We know the Southwest exists, but we do not know the Southwest." The editor of this anthology ultimately decided to accept Wallace Stegner's definition as being an area where water is scarce: "aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various West's one." Thus, this wonderful collection includes areas in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho,Montana, Washington, Oregon, and California. To be sure, it is a somewhat loose definition but what a collection this is. Organized around four themes or categories: "Watching Closely; Forays in Natural History"; Risking Experience: Adventures in the Wild"; "Living Close to the Land"; and "Taking a Stand: Voices of Conservation and Restoration," the reader is introduced to the Greater Southwest through fiction and nonfiction, field notes and poetry. The journey will take you to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and a family farm in south Texas. You will visit a Nevada Test Site and take a white water trip down the green river than ends all to soon. The short story on the release of Bison in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, Ok. was both delightful and inspiring. The story of the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah and it's place in the making of the atomic bomb, combined with an essay by T.H. Watkins titled "Not by Human Measure". will give the reader an idea of the magnificence of the region. The selections, in some 70 pieces and 400 pages, celebrate the grace, beauty and grandeur of a region little known and mostly misunderstood. These are wide-ranging efforts to explain the sometimes almost unexplainable in an area historically, and increasingly, under siege. There are those that argue such a book will only lead to more tourists and visitors to a region that has a fragile ecosystem and cannot tolerate much more "understanding." They argue that if to many heed the warning of Wallace Stegner: "you have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to het used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time," this treasure will go the way of Glen Canyon, parts of the Colorado River, the Rio Grande and other one-time natural wonders. At the expense of contributing to this possibility I must highly recommend this book. For anyone remotely interested in the southwest region or reading some of the best of the best contemporary nature writers published today, get this book. The University of Arizona Press is to be commended for this effort. It took a decade to get it published but was worth the wait.