With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays, 1995-2023

by Rick Bass

"Master craftsman" (Los Angeles Times) and beloved author Rick Bass explores ecological, social, and personal landscapes through this collection that brings together his best-loved essays and brand-new pieces

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.

Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription, to inhabit, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of the beauty in each moment. With Every Great Breath ranges from the extremely local-a long-form essay about the community affected by the largest Superfund site in US history, in Libby, Montana-to the the Galápagos, Namibia, and Alaska. Throughout, Bass offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders, even in the face of environmental crisis.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Nature, Science

11 pages, Audible Audio

First published September 22, 2024

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Jamie Tommins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thank Rick Bass for his work protecting the old growth forests of the northern Rockies, but I wish more of the wonder and fullness he feels in the presence of these natural forces had made its way to the page. From the first essay onward, we get what seem to be (a recurring phrase) the beginnings of great ideas, flickering recognition of great meaning under the surface, which go no further. For my part, having seen a good deal of the country and culture Bass writes about, I understand the feeling that one must truly experience it firsthand, that one must be there, in order to know it. Unfortunately that makes for thin stories, no matter how exciting or wonderous the material.

[John Acuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays spanning several decades, Mr.Bass has led a varied and eventful life as a geologist, nature lover, hunter, and environmental activist. He raised my awareness of several important issues.
The book is not a light read and he can be pretty wordy at times, prompting me to skip ahead over paragraphs.

[Cheryl]

To swim and soar as the whales are soaring this day—to do that even one day in our lives-would surely alter, transform, our existence-would be a life changer, a great whoosh of almost unbearable joy, the experience of a lifetime— and yet their unending days, across the decades, may well be filled with this intensity, joy, sweetness. They may be living at a level we cannot even comprehend enough to know envy, and perhaps for us this is a mercy, all we really know how to do thus far in the relationship is to kill them.

There is a wall of windows, and because it's the highest house in the burbs, you can see out over all the other rooftops, and over the village of Paia, and over the waving tops of the palms, to the soothing blue rolling waves beyond. Even to a non-sailor it is bewitching—you feel everything that was previously tense within you loosen and dissolve, or realign. It's almost impossible to look away from the vast blue ocean—it is like air—it seems that to look away would be to hold one's breath, to cease breathing— and yet the aesthetics of the room itself, one long room with a gleaming wooden floor and white walls and so brightly lit, with a drafting table and neat desk and bank of sleek computers at the far end, also compete for a visitor's attention, so that there is a confusion of grace, a bounty of the aesthetic, and a perfect, beautiful, delicate balance of the infinite blue sea and the life of the mind.

I have admired Bass for a long time for his gift with words and his activism to protect wilderness and the planet, and some of these essays continue the thread. I just hope one day he and other hunters realize that most of us won’t swim with a whale or a whale shark, but we do see moose and elk and deer and his privileged occurrences with ocean animals are our experience with moose and deer and elk and fox. In my nearly 25 years out west, I have rarely been gifted with such encounters, and I treasure each of them.

I still soar in my mind after seeing three moose, a male, female, and young juvenile, in rain on the Slate River. I still feel intense sweetness and joy thinking of the fawn and her mother I encountered in the forests of the Sawatch on a forest floor blooming with lupine. I feel the bounty of the aesthetic, the perfect, beautiful, delicate balance of seeing a bear and her cub in a driveway near Aspen, while safely in my car and shaking in fear and trembling since 50 feet away my I was letting my dog splash in a creek a few minutes before.

I have long struggled with the concept of hunting, trying to understand the why and the need, but he wrote in one of these essays how fun it was to hunt a certain animal. I know it is a skill and some do rely on it for food, but how dare a hunter kill my joy and the earth’s inhabitants for fun? The hypocrisy is unacceptable. So what then, do I stop reading him? What do I do with all the words, the weight and depth and poetry of them outweighing the words he wrote in others, but not outweighing the actions? It is a paradox I live with. My bear pictures did not come out since I didnt' want to disturb them and my long lens needs a non-shaky hand, but here are a few of the others:

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have two favorites in this collection of 18 older essays and three new ones. The first is the book's opener, "Into the Fire" (published in 1995), about structural firefighters --- your local fire department, not wildland firefighters --- and the lives of those who work in emergency services. The work changes a person: "He's different from how he was in high school," Bass writes about his volunteer firefighter friend, "the fire has altered him." My second favorite is the first of the new essays, "Firebuilder," about Barry Lopez. There are good bits throughout the other essays, and the topics are interesting, but it sometimes feels as though we are wandering through a story, down spur paths that eventually loop back to the original thread. I'm not a regular reader of Rick Bass, so maybe that's his style, but for me finishing the book felt like the end of a very long walk.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays. All are very well written. Some are much more interesting than others. The essays all have an overall theme of our environment and what is happening to it. Worth the read, but definitely a bit hit or miss for me. I received an advance review copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[bailey diamond · Rating 2 out of 5]

there were like 2 short stories i really liked, otherwise not super into it

[Geneval Banner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bass is, and forever will be, a 5 star read. this time I listened on audio, read by the author.

[Seung · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter talks about Fires, the second about squatting. Yeah this is gonna be good. Can't wait for the whale chapter. The thing about Bass is that through nature, he explores the humanity of various people. People who live quiet, quotidian, normal lives.

Favorite chapters (essays) Into the Fire, The Rage of the Squat King, Whale Song, The Beauty That Wills Us On, Fifteen Dogs, With Every Great Breath.

Some of the science came off as a bit iffy and sometimes, the essays do digress. But at the end of the day, these are personal essays. Before reading the eponymous story, I didn't even know about Libby, Montana and W.R. Grace.