Erosion: Essays of Undoing

by Terry Tempest Williams

Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist

Terry Tempest Williams is one of our most impassioned defenders of public lands. A naturalist, fervent activist, and stirring writer, she has spoken to us and for us in books like The Hour of A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks and An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

She looks at the current state of American the dire social and environmental implications of recent choices to gut Bears Ears National Monument, sacred lands to Native People of the American Southwest, and undermine the Endangered Species Act. She testifies that climate change is not an abstraction, citing the drought outside her door and at times, within herself. Images of extraction and contamination haunt “oil rigs lighting up the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste on dirt roads now crisscrossing the desert like an exposed nervous system.” But beautiful moments of relief and refuge, solace and spirituality come—in her conversations with Navajo elders, art, and, always, in the land itself. She asks, “Is Earth not enough? Can the desert be a prayer?”

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Nature, Environment, Memoir, Science, Politics

354 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2019

About the author

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.

She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.

Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.

In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.

Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Reviews

[J.L. Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to hear the words "public lands" spoken in every election debate, with candidates holding both government and corporations accountable in their oversight and use."



In Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Terry Tempest Williams sounds like a visionary in the best sense of the word. She argues for a sane use of public lands with passion that is anchored in both the importance of the land and how it is being used, along with legislative efforts to protect public lands (and legislative setbacks during the Trump administration) . Erosion is also a memoir about family and purpose and coping with loss. Some of the last third of this collection (with the exception of her brother's suicide and cremation) feels a bit repetitive as Williams continues to deal with the politics surrounding a specific national park; however, this is such a timely and powerful work. I will be reading it again!

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We are eroding and evolving, all at once."

Terry Tempest Williams tackles the theme of erosion and undoing throughout these essays - examining topics of public lands, family, career, belief. There is an underlying tension between connectedness and grief that I've experienced in her writing before.

I'm posting this a few days after finishing and I just keep thinking about her losing her job at the University of Utah after she and her husband tried protecting some land by forming a trust and bidding on the lease. She herself is an institution, living in Utah, teaching writing, and her own undoing included moving across the country at last part of the year just to make a living.

TW for Trump-led destruction of protected lands, harm to Diné communities, and suicide.

I had a copy from FSG Books through Netgalley and this book comes out October 8, 2019.

[Brandie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oof- this book is what the withered soul needs. For those of us living under oppressive Trump Era policies, Terry Tempest Williams says what we’re all feeling- with regards to his environmental (non)protection policies. She has had to live closely with them, as a resident of Utah, and an advocate for public and indigenous lands. Her essays are beautiful, personal, and reverent. She is reverent to herself, her land, and her people in a way that many of us have forgotten, or never learned.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Orr writes, “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

This essay collection by Tempest Williams definitely is what is needed as we attempt to survive the unraveling of what the Trump administration was doing to our environmental protection policies.

She is a modern-day Rachel Carson. With sincerity, honesty, and grit, her essays speak to all of us – to stop, listen, and maybe find a way to reform.

Mostly, to hope that what is occurring now can be stopped.

Her central theme is around erosion - erosion of land, democracy, compassion, and science. Her writing is suffused with compassion and joy even when she writes about the Trump administration gutting Bears Ears and the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) selling oil and mining rights on public land for pennies on the dollar. As she says, even as the world burns it is still beautiful.

But, you can’t help but feel your heart break.

Those of us that love this Earth, and hate what that administration was doing to it, can’t help but feel her words and want to act ourselves. Maybe that is what she needed us to do! Take action. Each essay is short, but meaningful.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay collection looks at many erosions - of the self through aging and life trials, of the land, and, mainly, of the American political culture. TTW’s strength is in the personal essay, and the essays included here are passionate, insightful, and beautifully written. Other pieces were not as strong, but the collection overall was powerful.

[Daniel Ryave · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I agreed with the author's stance on the beauty of the world and our obligation to protect it, I just did not love this collection of essays. Williams's lyrical prose and intermittent poetry often deployed language so flowery and overwrought that I couldn't help but roll my eyes. (Example: "In the creases of buttes and mesas / Time is held without thought.") There are golden nuggets throughout Williams's essays ostensibly written around a singular theme. Her recollections of personal losses and the suicide attempt of a stranger were striking and gorgeously told. However, Williams focuses the vast majority of her time on public lands, specifically Bears Ears. By retelling the same history multiple times through a similar vantage point, the essays become redundant and fail to add new meaning to points she establishes quite well early on. Many of the essays are repetitive in this way or poorly edited: a transcript of an interview she conducts could have been halved without losing a single ounce of meaning, for instance. For people who love National Parks and public lands (as I do!), you will find some inspiration and solace in these essays. But more than that you may find frustration--not at the author or at the writings, but at yourself for struggling to connect with Terry Tempest Williams as much as you had hoped you would.

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last two essays are excellent, highly recommended.
★★★★★ Dwelling
★★★★★ Coda: the Liturgy of Home

You might also enjoy:

✱ Braiding Sweetgrass
✱ Kings of the Yukon
✱ Small Wonder: Essays
✱ Islands, the Universe, Home: Essays
✱ The Solace of Open Spaces
✱ Full Body Burden
✱ The World in a Grain
✱ American Serengeti
✱ From Here to Eternity
✱ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
✱ Horizon
✱ Tip of the Iceberg
✱ The Library of Ice
✱ The Secret Wisdom of Nature
✱ The Hidden Life of Trees
✱ The Songs of Trees
✱ In Search of the Canary Tree
✱ The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
✱ Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River
✱ Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

[KC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terry Tempest Williams is a voice to be heard. A modern day Rachel Carson. With sincerity, honesty, and grit, her essays speak to all of us-to stop, listen, and reform.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

i smell the wound and it smells like me. this wound will not heal and is spreading as an infection. stabbed by our illusions and legacies of grandeur, we stagger through our forests of consumption. we are lost. we are in pain. and we don't know the cause or the cure of what is making us sick. we long for something more, when what we have is more than enough. we are becoming blind. we are becoming deaf. we are hobbling along the path of distractions, trying to find our way back or forward or sideways to a place of dreams as we bleed from the wound of longing.

activist, nature writer, and conservationist, terry tempest williams is also an american treasure. in her new book, erosion: essays of undoing, williams confronts dualities political, personal, and paradoxical. with erosion (in all its many forms) as a foundational theme, williams explores and expounds upon a variety of timely issues, many tied to the ongoing destruction of our natural world and the institutional greed and indifference that allows causes it to accelerate virtually unabated.

wilderness ensures possibilities. saving wilderness is about saving ourselves, as well as protecting the evolutionary integrity of all other life forms on the planet. an open hand and a clenched fist will be required, along with a generous heart that dares to feel enough to grieve and lament what we are watching disappear and try to slow down the destruction we have set in motion.

there are many qualities to williams's writing that make it so exceptionally evocative. her ability to distill a subject to its irreducible essence is remarkable, but perhaps what is most noteworthy is her natural gift for observation and interpretation. balancing empathy and outrage, anger and forgiveness, beauty and loss, hope and despair, thinking and feeling, knowledge and action, williams harmonizes the disparate. grace and grief and wisdom and weariness inhabit each of these essays (collected from the last seven years). there is a deep joy and a deep sorrow in her work, but williams seems to conjure vulnerability with ease, and the breadth of her passion is quite often something to behold. terry tempest williams is simply a magnificent writer and erosion is simultaneously a salvo and salve for our disquieting anthropocenic age.

not until we begin to understand the true costs of what we have lost and the pain we have inflicted on people and nature through the destruction of fragile landscapes and communities in the commodification and extraction of the earth, can a healing between us take place. our collective crisis of conscience and consciousness in this ear of climate change is based on self-delusion, privilege, and our sense of entitlement, all of which continue to fuel the power and rapaciousness of our appetites. it is killing us.

* 4.5 stars

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some essays I thought were worthy of a 3 and some a five, so I am giving the book as a whole an average rating of 4. Basically, the writings convey the panic brought on by an environmentalist who is on the front line watching big business trample the desire of the majority to protect our natural surroundings. Will climate change and the greed of humans inevitably destroy life as we know it. What will be left after the destruction? How hard do we fight. How do we rebuild? How do we continue to love our family and acquaintances who are hellbent on the side of greed and destruction?

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant and timely, this collection speaks to the heart of our environmental crisis and the people we must become to weather the storm of our collective discord with the natural world to this point. Tempest Williams deftly weaves personal heartache and evolution into her plea for us to care enough to act, to let one life form mean as much as any other, to build beauty again in a world that we have all but destroyed through greed and complacency. An absolute must read for all who care about the ground under our feet.

[Emma Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Is Earth not enough?
I need these words tattooed between my shoulders so heaven can read them burned into my skin when I lie on the ground breathing in sage and listening to the ravens flying over me.
Jesus Christ is my brother, not a god, this is the heart of the matter.”

“humans cannot create nature, only destroy it.”

this collection felt like a hike: so many hills and plateaus, each view grander than the last, until finally you see the world from the mountain you’ve climbed.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, informative read. Best read in small spurts so you don’t feel tooooo existential about the inevitable environmental collapse.

[Samantha Shain · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not live up to the reviews or my own expectations. While it was promised to have a narrative arc, I thought the essays drew on repetitive material and came off as overly sentimental. The one about the authors brother was evocative and strongly written, but the parallel to the process of climate change struck a dissonant chord. The essay about the authors visit to China seemed impressionistic and culturally unexamined. I love reading about Utah and the incredibly unique ecosystems there, but this volume fell flat for me. It’s one redeeming factor was some beautiful language on pages that I have dog eared. Some of her best writing was about people and not flora/fauna but it doesn’t seem like she wants to pursue that theme with further specificity.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is exactly the type of book I fall in love with. A deep appreciation of nature, married with thoughtful outlooks on life, carried by a necessary political lens. I adored this and Terry Tempest Williams will easily become a must-read author for me. (Please note - tears were shed in ‘The Questions Held By Owls’ and ‘A Beautiful, Rugged Place.’)

I sincerely appreciated the middle finger to Trump throughout the text and while this was published during his first term and focuses on the destruction he caused back then, I imagine Terry to be boldly holding up a second middle finger to him now (2025) as he works diligently to dismantle this country and destroy the Earth it rests upon. I’d be happy to contribute my middle fingers in this act as well.

“To sorrow in the suffering of the world together may be what we need to embrace now, something beyond hope, deeper than hope, which is to honor our grief of a changing world.”

“We need not lose hope, we just need to locate where it dwells.”

[Saba Houmani]

This made me cry in a few places 😶

[Hailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars! This was a really well-written and beautifully visual book. I learned a lot and I really appreciated the essay format. My only qualm is that I would have appreciated hearing more voices in essays other than TTW’s — she talks so much about listening to Indigenous people about environmental concerns and I think it would have been really nice for the book to include more of those voices as well as the others that she included. The essays where other people were involved were some of my favs!

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I would like to hear the words "public lands" spoken in every election debate, with candidates holding both government and corporations accountable in their oversight and use. The fact of more than three hundred million visits to our national parks last year tells me I am not alone.”

This is the latest essay collection by TTW, one of our treasured naturalists. This one focuses on “erosion”. The current assaults on our public lands and the erosion of science and environmental concerns. The centerpiece here is the Bear Ears National Monument, which Trump infamously tried to strip of his national monument status, in 2017. This is happening in her home state of Utah. TTW offers such a clear and concise plea, to all Americans: Wake up and pay attention, before these great lands are ravaged. Her books are also wonderful on audio, with the author's own compassionate delivery.

[Andrea Montan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was truly beautiful and heartbreaking and necessary. Some essays left me terrified. Some made me sob. But most left me hopeful and inspired. Tempest Williams writes lyrically, passionately and honestly about everything we as a species are doing to destroy our natural places and ourselves. I learned so much reading this book and found that I still have so much left to learn. This is a powerful call to action. Let’s start, shall we?

[Tamsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I dunno, this felt like I had to be in the right kind of mood for it. That said, even though I am 100% for nature and environmental protection and totally against Trump, this also felt repetitive and maybe more angry than I had the energy for. I'm just here, listlessly, restlessly waiting for our next president (please god).

[Kira · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5! The last few essays were really good. This book was written very beautifully but I still took issue with the ways in which public lands were portrayed as an ~*American birthright*~ and not violent genocidal projects and that put a bad taste in my mouth that was hard to shake ://

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A Galapagos Journal" and the conversation between TTW and Tim DeChristopher were favorites of mine from this collection.

[Annapurna Holtzapple · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is required reading for anybody struggling with the climate crisis or climate anxiety or grief, for all Americans, for anybody who has ever visited a National Park in the US, for anybody who has driven a car that consumes gasoline

the first book was slow and tbh you could skip it but you cannot pass up the latter three—i tried to really read this slowly and reflect and annotate and underline meaningfully but I still couldn’t stop myself from finishing it so quickly

to echo Elisabeth Egan, a mix of both Annie Dillard and Joan Didion

[Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only have positive things to say about this. If I could select any person to be a mentor in ways of being, it would be Terry Tempest Williams.

My god, so many of these essays changed and added brilliance to my own perspectives around conservation efforts and caring for wildness. I found myself enjoying delving into such important environmental knowledge, as well as the treacherous dance of politics that surround protecting our natural lands. This collection covers a vast array of vulnerable topics in such a lovely and concise way. I’m disappointed it took me so long to complete this work, will be returning to it and excited to read more of her wonderful words.

[Sedona McNerney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was AMAZING. It perfectly encapsulated so many emotions and wanderings/wonderings I have been unable to put into words for so long. It filled a spiritual longing that I had been seeking to find, reconciling my stepping away from one religion I had known for so long while longing for something that made more sense and made me feel more whole. Well written, makes you think a little more critically, and helps you appreciate the world we live in a little more deeply.

[Merry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between a 3.5 and a 4, not because I didn't love it, just because it's an essay collection (= not all essays are equally interesting to me) and because I'm not sure it's the best place to start with Terry Tempest Williams' writing. If you care about ecology, politics, and landscape, I feel like I can confidently recommend her as a writer to check out, though.

[Charlie Rabbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

My love for Terry Tempest Williams continues on in this book. I read Refuge in a writing class, and not long after was gifted this book, with no prior knowledge of my enjoyment for Refuge. I loved each word on each page. I have found such inspiration from Terry Tempest Williams, she reminds me to love nature, reading, writing, and myself. She tells me to keep hope for the world, and I hold on dearly to that. Thank you.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erosion is the perfect metaphor for these often heart breaking, sometimes piercingly beautiful, essays. These writings both mourn and celebrate the powerfully changing landscape of the desert Southwest and the ties that bind us to the natural world.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily a new favorite. I didn’t realize before I read, but the author is a native Utahn and a lot of this book is about Utah, which makes it hit even closer to home.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good so good so good