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Last Stand.
America's Virgin Lands.
Photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt. Text by Barbara Kingsolver.
National Geographic, Washington, 2002.
192 pp.,
100 hand-tinted and color illustrations,
12x10".
Publisher's Description
LAST STAND
AMERICA'S VIRGIN LANDS
In unforgettable words and images, best-selling author Barbara
Kingsolver and award-winning photographer Annie Grifiths
Belt celebrate the last corners of America where wilderness
still reigns.
Last Stand takes readers from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas to the Arctic
tundra of Alaska to the deserts of the Southwest and bears passionate
witness to our last wildernesses, reminding us why they must be preserved.
Dedicated conservationist and acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver
teams with National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt to
capture the essence of America's endangered virgin lands. In her moving
introduction and in the essays opening each chapter, Kingsolver deftly
explores the ways of wilderness, the threats against it, and what it needs
to survive. Griffiths Belt's accompanying hand-tinted infrared photographs
breathtakingly evoke the spirit and beauty of these diverse bioregions.
Excerpt from Last Stand by Barbara Kingsolver:
The human imagination seems to reserve its greatest dread and reverence for drylands: We name them badlands, the great barrens, the places we call deserted. From
Siberia to the Monument Valley, these ends of the Earth have long been considered
by human establishments to be places of exile and emptiness, a special punishment
reserved for populations that needed to be pushed from greener pastures.
And just as surely as we deprecate the hostility of these lands, we also understand somehow that they are God's country. We have designated many thousands
of acres of our western deserts as parks and preserves, and the names we give to
these places-Zion, Moab, Devil's Garden, Thunder Mesa, Desolation Canyon-
disclose an uneasy knowledge that they are spectacles almost beyond our ownership. We're awed by these landscapes where the Earth will he down
and reveal herself to us so completely.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
is the best-selling author of The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, Pigs
in Heaven, The Bean Trees, and
Animal Dreams. Her most recent work
is a collection of essays, Small Wonder,
published in 2002.
ANNIE GRIFFITHS BELT
has photographed the world's landscapes,
cities, and people for National
Geographic for almost 25 years. Her
award-winning work has also appeared
in Life, Geo, Stern, and Paris Match,
as well as in numerous books.
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