The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

    To touch one, he shows, is to tamper with them all.Here he continues issues first raised in The Unsettling of America; the problems addressed there are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand, Mr. Berry writes of his journeys to the highlands of Peru, the deserts of southern Arizona, and the Amish country to study traditional agricultural practices. He writes of homesteading, tools and their uses, horses and tractors, family work, land reclamation, diversified land use.In the title essay Mr. Berry draws parallels between the Christian notion of stewardship and the Buddhist doctrine of "right livelihood." He develops the compelling argument that the "gift" of good land has strings attached: the recipient has it only as long as he practices responsible stewardship.

    While backpacking in an isolated part of the Nevada desert in 1968, Colin Fletcher came upon an old wooden trunk standing at the mouth of a cave. Inside the cave he found what appeared to be a man's possessions, coated with the dust of years. These personal but anonymous effects - among them fragments of a 1916 newspaper - stirred Fletcher's imagination, and a year later he went back and lived in the cave for ten days. The experience inspired in him a determination to piece together the life of the man who had preceded him. After his article describing the discovery and the beginnings of his investigation appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fletcher heard from Grace Mazeris, an elderly woman who told him she believed that the cave dweller was a prospector named 'Chuckawalla' Bill Simmons - a man she had once lived with. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Mazeris died and Fletcher, realizing that time was running out, began in earnest to reconstruct Chuckawalla Bill's life. Using records from the National Archives and from Simmons's home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Fletcher meticulously and persistently tracked the man's first wanderings as a youth, his service in the Philippine insurrection after the Spanish-American War, and his restless movements - often under an alias - across the western United States. The trail led Fletcher to people who had known Bill Simmons at various times in his life - family members, other men and women who had prospected, played cards, and drunk with him in the desert towns of California. Their encounters are intensely moving as memories of Bill, dormant for decades, are affectionately aroused...." Illustrated with numerous black and white photographs, map endpapers.

    Absorbing, readable, brilliantly imaginative but always grounded in fact, 2081 is a wonderful look at the world of tomorrow, a new 1984, but one that looks forward to a bright future.

    

    Numerous illustrations and B/W photos.

    It is well produced with clear illustrations and text, and gives excellent factual information on a large number of topics."(Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology)"...represents a significant contribution to the literature of geoscience. It should be in the library of anyone seriously intereted in sedimentology."(Marine Geology)"This book is still unsurpassed in providing a good, basic synthesis of modern sedimentary environments, especially the physical attributes of the deposits being formed and the processes responsible..." (Sedimentary Geology)

    Livingston, one of Canada's leading naturalists, makes the persuasive argument that unless new approaches are found to our perception of nature and our place within it, it will soon be impossible to reverse the destruction man is inflicting on nature.Livingston has written a fasinating, wide-ranging, and highly provocative work. Blending metaphysiscs, scientific observation, and a poet's eye for the beauty of the natural world, he creates a compelling case for a new vision of existence. (from the back cover)

    Course found in both Geology and Oceanography departments. The first comprehensive and entirely new volume on marine geology since the emergence of the plate tectonic revolution in earth sciences and deep-sea drilling. Written by a foremost authority in the field.

    -- The Sciences