Photography Through the Ages: Helpful Resources

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence." The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.

Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is surely one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. In it he tells of his stint as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, of his love for the natural beauty that surrounded him, and of his distaste for the modernizing improvements designed to increase visitation to the park. "I confess to being a nature lover," admits Abbey more than thirty years after his sojourn in the wilderness.

In 1962, photographer Eliot Porter and the Sierra Club founder, David Brower, published this bestselling, and now long-out-of-print, classic monograph that has often been referred to as ""the very first coffee table book"" ever published. Porter masterfully created and paired his color photographs of the New England woods with passages by writer Henry David Thoreau.

"Recent Thoreau scholarship has concentrated on Thoreau as prescient forest ecologist; McKibben - author of the End of Nature and one of our best-read social and environmental critics - places him firmly back in his role as cultural and spiritual seer.

Scot Miller takes on the seminal work of John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. The book details Muir's first extended trip to the Sierra Nevada in what is now Yosemite National Park, a landscape that entranced him immediately and had a profound effect on his life.

In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America's most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness.

The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.

A soul-satisfying collection of 12 essays by the noted philosopher and poet who embraced independence, rejected conformity, and loved nature.

Collective works of Ralph Waldo Emmerson.

Emerson provides a world of nature, battered by the assaults of a burgeoning population but arrives at a flow to remind us of the spiritual elements of nature itself.

America's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year.

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America's Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah. Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by.