This recording of “Resonance of Stone” read by Terry Tempest Williams, is an essay, written especially for Patagonia, appearing in the paperback version of Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams published by Picador. Listen below!
Overview of the Book: Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Terry Tempest Williams’s fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?”
We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument―sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which “oil rigs light up the horizon.” And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.
These essays are Williams’s call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory―emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.
Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone.
Learn more and get the book here.
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Not enough of an overview & where is it the book available, on Amazon where there’s perhaps a “Look inside?” of a few pages?
If you click the title of the book, which is a link in two places within the post, it leads to the book on Amazon.
I have aging hearing loss. Can barely understand her. Can you print the text of her reading? Or send it to me. And please say hello to her for me. We have read together in Moab and Flagstaff. Thank you. Mary Sojourner
Unfortunately, there is no transcript, but the essay she is reading from appears in her book Erosion. So if you order the book (or borrow it from a library) you can read it!