Nearly five billion years ago, Earth and Mars were born together as planetary siblings orbiting a young, emerging Sun. Yet today, one planet is water rich and life bearing, while the other is seemingly cold, dry, and forbidding. Earth and Mars is a fusion of art and science, a blend of images and essays celebrating the successful creation of our life-sustaining planet and the beauty and mystery of Mars. Through images of terrestrial landscapes and photographs selected from recent NASA and European Space Agency missions to Mars, Earth and Mars reveals the profound beauty resulting from the action of volcanism, wind, and water. The accompanying text provides a context for appreciating the role of these elemental forces in shaping the surfaces of each planet, as well as the divergent evolutionary paths that led to an Earth that is teeming with life, and Mars that is seemingly lifeless. Earth and Mars inspires reflection on the extraordinarily delicate balance of forces that has resulted in our good fortune: to be alive and sentient on a bountiful blue world.

Earth and Mars: A Reflection

Arts & Photography

Strom, Stephen E.

Smith, Bradford A.

Photography & Video

University of Arizona Press

Far to the south of Arizona’s sprawling metropolises, a rolling savanna of grass, oak, and mesquite rises above the surrounding deserts. The Sonoita Plain is a basin of a thousand square miles bracketed by mountains, a land once the domain of cowboys that is now more and more the focus of exurban development. These southwestern grasslands are both typical of and distinct from those of the Great Plains—similarly shaped by drought, grazing, and fire, but with a different flora and fauna, and the product of a different human history. The Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch is a tract of 8,000 acres on the Sonoita Plain that was established in 1968 by the Appleton family and that is now part of the sanctuary system of the National Audubon Society. To all appearances, it is an ordinary piece of land, but for the last 35 years it has been treated in an extraordinary way—by leaving it alone. No grazing to influence grass production. No dam building to hold back flash floods. No pest control. No fire-fighting. By employing such non-action, might we gain a glimpse of what this land was like hundreds, even thousands, of years ago? Through essays and photographs focusing on the Sanctuary and surrounding area, this book reveals the complex ecology and unique aesthetics of its grasslands and savannas. Carl and Jane Bock and Stephen Strom share a passion for the remarkable beauty found here, and in their book they describe its environment, biodiversity, and human history. People have dominated the world’s grasslands and savannas for so long that today we have no clear idea what these lands might be like without us. By understanding the lessons of the Sonoita Plain, we might gain such insight—and, more important, discover approaches to protecting the very things that attract us to such lands in the first place.

Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland

History

Bock, Carl E.

Jane H. Bock

Americas

With its clear skies and low humidity, the southwestern United States is an astronomer’s paradise where observatories like Kitt Peak have redefined the art of skywatching. The region is unique in its loose federation of like-minded research outposts and in the quantity and diversity of its observatories—places captured in this unique guidebook. Douglas Isbell and Stephen Strom, both intimately involved in southwestern astronomy, have written a practical guide to the major observatories of the region for those eager to learn what modern telescopes are doing, to understand the role each of these often quirky places has played in advancing our understanding of the cosmos, and hopefully to visit and see the tools of the astronomer up close. For each observatory, the authors describe its history, highlights of its contributions to astronomy—with an emphasis on recent results—and information for visitors. Also included are wide-ranging interviews with astronomers closely associated with each site. Observatories covered range from McDonald in Texas to Palomar in California, with significant outposts in between: Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and the Whipple Observatory outside Amado; and New Mexico’s Very Large Array near Socorro and Sacramento Peak close to Sunspot. In addition to describing these established institutions, they also take a look ahead to the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world just beginning to operate at full power on Mount Graham in Safford, Arizona. With more than three dozen illustrations, Observatories of the Southwest is accessible to amateur astronomers, tourists, students, and teachers—anyone fascinated with the contributions that astronomy has made to deepening our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, whether exploring the solar system from Lowell Observatory or studying the birth of stars using the army of giant radio telescopes at the Very Large Array. This book aims to inspire visits to these sites by illuminating the major scientific questions being pursued every clear night beneath the dark skies of the Southwest and the amazing machinery that makes these pursuits possible.

Observatories of the Southwest: A Guide for Curious Skywatchers

Science & Math

Isbell, Douglas

Astronomy & Space Science

A landscape of great natural beauty, Utah’s red rock country is a place where the passage from deep time to the present is revealed in stunningly sculpted and colorful geological strata that span 350 million years of Earth’s history. At the heart of this dramatic landscape is the Greater San Rafael Swell—a land of both geologic and human tumult.\nNatural and human history come together in The Greater San Rafael Swell, which spans much of Emery County in Utah. Authors Stephen Strom and Jonathan Bailey paint a multi-faceted picture of a singular place through photographs, along with descriptions of geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, and dozens of interviews with individuals who devoted more than two decades to developing a shared vision of the future of both the Swell and the County. At its core, the book relates the important story of how a coalition of ranchers, miners, off-road enthusiasts, conservationists, recreationists, and Native American tribal nations worked together for nearly 25 years to forge and pass the Emery County Public Lands Management Act in 2019.\nThis book chronicles hopeful stories for our times: how citizens of Emery and three other counties in the rural West worked to resolve perhaps the most volatile issue in the region – the future of public lands. Both their successes and the processes by which they found common ground serve as beacons in today’s uncertain landscape – beacons that can illuminate paths toward rebuilding our shared democracy from the ground up.

The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands

Bailey, Jonathan

Death Valley is the lowest, driest, and hottest area in North America. Located about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles (770 square kilometers). A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes Telescope Peak that towers over the valley at 11,049 feet elevation (3,367 meters) and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national monument in 1933 and expanded into a national park in 1994, its rugged yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts more than 1,000,000 visitors per year. Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics, began regularly traveling there some thirty-five years ago. His acute eye for abstract, almost pointillist compositions not only reveals the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, but it also takes in the vast, colorful sweep of land and sky as well as the land’s myriad details—volcanic cinder cones and sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains—that give the area its distinctive and varied character. Strom’s photographs are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming’s original sequence of poems, written for this book, that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. And Rebecca A. Senf’s perceptive essay situates Strom’s work within the canon of those photographers who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno. Death Valley: Painted Light is a book unlike any other about a landscape whose topographic relief and sheer beauty are unforgettable.

Death Valley: Painted Light

Deming, Alison Hawthorne

Senf, Rebecca A.

Individual Artists

George F. Thompson Publishing

On December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama acted to protect nearly 1.4 million acres in southeastern Utah as the Bears Ears National Monument. The monument preserves a landscape of unsurpassed beauty, filled with more than 100,000 Native American archaeological sites, some dating back more than two millennia. For the first time, tribes who look to Bears Ears for spiritual and material sustenance will work collaboratively with federal agencies to set policies for managing the monument. The photographs in Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land capture the singular beauty of Bears Ears country in all seasons, its textural subtleties portrayed alongside the drama of expansive landscapes and skies, deep canyons, spires, and towering mesas. To photographer Stephen E. Strom’s sensitive eyes, a scrub oak on a hillside or a pattern in windswept sand is as essential to capturing the spirit of the landscape as the region’s most iconic vistas. In seeing red-rock country through his lens, viewers can begin to discover the remarkable diversity, seductive power, and disarming complexity of Bears Ears’ sacred lands. Strom’s photographs convey what so many have fought to preserve for so long. Like the land itself, they evince the full spectrum of emotional responses: exhilaration and disorientation, contemplation and serenity, passion and gratitude for the wild places and archeological treasures that now belong to all Americans. Rebecca Robinson’s informative essay provides historical context for how the national monument came to be. Years from now, this book may serve as either a celebration of the foresight of visionary leaders, from Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama who have set aside lands such as Bears Ears, or as an elegy for what was lost.

Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land

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