Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR BARBARA KINGSOLVER brings her passion for the wilderness to bear in this striking book. Trained as a biologist, Kingsolver writes authoritatively, and movingly, about the continent’s virgin pockets of desert, coast, grassland, forest, and wetland. ONE-OF-A-KIND Specially commissioned infrared photographs, taken and hand-tinted by Belt, create a painterly portrait of wild landscapes that gives this an art book appeal. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Readers look to the Geographic as a leading expert in the geography and ecology of America. America’s virgin lands are not always where you’d expect to find them – in national parks or other preserves. They’re scattered in often small, sometimes barely known pockets across the continent. These are the remnants that remind us of what wildness once meant – and what will be lost if it disappears. In her moving introduction and in the essays that open each chapter, Kingsolver discusses the ways of wilderness, the threats against it, its natural imperatives and what it needs to survive in the different forms featured in the chapters – as grassland, wetland, dryland, coast, and woodland. Annie Griffiths Belt’s evocative colour and hand-tinted photographs capture the essence of these diverse bioregions. The images take you from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and Nevada to the Arctic tundra of Alaska, from the endangered coral reefs off the Florida Keys to the Pacific-pounded coast of Oregon, from the deserts of the Southwest to the sky-piercing redwoods of California.