$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
184 pages with 82 color photos by the author; 12 color maps; 10 diagrams; 3 montage (with 50 historic photos); and 2 charts (with 24 photos) = 109 illustrations
11.5″ x 9.0″ (horizontal/landscape)
ISBN 978–1–960521–04–0
Published in April 2025
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
TBA
by Stephen Strom
with essays and epigraphs by Kathleen Dean Moore
An environmental success story involving people from all walks of life and points of view!
At a time when division, polarization, misinformation, and antagonisms pervade the United States, there is hope for the future. Landscapes of Hope shows how people from all walks of life and backgrounds can come together, talk, work out details, and compromise to do something special for generations to come: safeguarding 900,000 acres of spectacular wild country in Utah.
Perched on the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Greater San Rafael Swell spans 8,000 square miles in south-central Utah and showcases a rich tapestry of landscapes. Its colorful geological strata span 350 million years of Earth’s history and contain a remarkably well-preserved fossil record from times when primitive marine species first emerged to the era of dinosaurs and the appearance of large mammals. The region’s arid climate and isolation have also worked together to preserve cultural artifacts left by Indigenous peoples who have occupied the area for some 13,000 years.
As the treasures of the Greater San Rafael Swell became widely known, conservationists undertook campaigns during the 1960s to designate large tracts of public lands in the region as wilderness, where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Initially, some residents of Emery County, located in the heart of the Greater Swell, strongly opposed these efforts, concerned that wilderness designations could limit ranching and mining, undermine residents’ livelihoods, and sever their cultural ties to the lands.
Reconciling these opposing views at first seemed impossible, but, starting in the late 1990s, Emery County leaders and residents engaged a wide spectrum of stakeholders in discussions spanning more than two decades. In 2019, their efforts to find common ground culminated in the passage of the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, which designated substantial portions of public lands for multiple uses while creating twenty-five new wilderness and other protected areas, safeguarding nearly 900,000 stunningly beautiful acres.
Landscapes of Hope celebrates the commitment of those who took rightful pride in their heritage yet worked with others to forge comprehensive legislation, conserving landscapes of extraordinary grandeur and profound cultural and ecological importance. The fruits of their endeavors are portrayed in Steve Strom’s captivating photographs and informative stories that showcase the splendor of the areas now protected in perpetuity.
About
About the Author
Stephen E. Strom spent forty-five years as a distinguished research astronomer at Harvard University, SUNY Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). At the time of his retirement in 2007, he was Associate Director for Science at NOAO (now NOIR Lab). In 1978, Strom also began to make fine-art photographs of the American West. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. For all of his books of photography, Strom has collaborated with distinguished poets, writers, scientists, and curators: Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2018), Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016), Death Valley: Painted Light (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016), Earth and Mars: A Reflection (Arizona, 2015), Sand Mirrors (Polytropos, 2012), Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis, 2009), Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grasslands (New Mexico, 2008), Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland (Arizona, 2005), Tseyi / Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly (Arizona, 2005), and Secrets from the Center of the World (Arizona, 1989).
About the Essayist
Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosopher, activist, and award-winning nature writer who for many years was a professor of environmental ethics at Oregon State University. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, Conservation Biology, Discover, High Country News, Orion, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. She is the author and co-editor of numerous books about nature and climate ethics, including Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers (Oregon State University Press, 2022), Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case against Fracking and Climate Change (Oregon State University Press, 2021), Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World (Counterpoint, 2021), Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (Counterpoint, 2016), and Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (Trinity University Press, 2011), which was co-edited by Michael Nelson and featured a foreword by Desmond Tutu.
Slide Show
My Place
The sandstone was cold on my back, that early October morning. I lay there, opening myself to the Utah sky, imagining the infinite universe beyond, grasping for comfort in its vastness. I had come here to be with close friends and family, to reflect on how Karen, my late wife, companion, muse, and closest friend of 56 years, had touched our lives. She passed suddenly from this world five months earlier, and in my post-dawn reverie I recalled our last moments together.
Why come to remember in this place, an isolated rock promontory on Cedar Mesa, 1,500 feet above the eroded sandstone mesas and pinnacles of Valley of the Gods? We were both academics, citizens of a world of scientists, moving with ease among collaborators in Japan, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. Connected as we were with colleagues throughout the world and as peripatetic as our lives could be, there was no place, no land that we could call our true home. With one exception: the red rock country of southeastern Utah.
Neither of us were Westerners: I was born in New York City and Karen in eastern Oklahoma. We made our first visits to the Colorado Plateau in our early forties, when we began to explore landscapes of the Navajo Nation. Drawn to both the country and its people, we decided to offer our services to teach a few classes at Navajo Community College (now Diné College) in Tsaile, Arizona, during the summers of 1981 and 1982. We soon developed relationships not only with the land, but with a web of Native writers, poets, sculptors, and painters. Our scientific careers led us eastward to Amherst, Massachusetts, which was our base for 14 years. But throughout those years we were drawn to return to land we thought of as home: camping and hiking in southeastern and south-central Utah, capturing the landscape’s chromatic and sculptural rhythms in photographs and later joining those images with the work of Native poets Joy Harjo and Laura Tohe.
We also invited our children and grandchildren to join us in exploring the slickrock, hogbacks, hoodoos, rivers, and canyon labyrinths of what was slowly becoming “home.” They came, and some learned to love the land as we did. One is the essayist for this book and the author of its companion: Voices from Bears Ears Country: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. Rebecca: who hiked to White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly at the age of 4 and on a hot summer day in 1988 immersed her feet in the sands and waters of Chinle Creek—a baptism celebrating her joining the congregation of redrock worshippers.
Today, on Muley Point, she, a quarter-century older, stood nearby me, as we gathered our thoughts in silence—the majesty of the land compels no less. And in that silence she, too, I imagined, felt the power of this place, the sun, the sky, the rock, the San Juan River nearby. This promontory and the Colorado Plateau on which it stands, has borne witness to many changes: to the shift of tectonic plates that carried it on a journey of more than a billion years, starting from near the equator to where it stands today, some 5,000 miles to the north; to the uplift, which raised the Plateau from sea level to more than a mile above the oceans; to the arrival of megafauna and then man; to the rise of agricultural and then urban civilizations; to the coming of the Spanish and Mormons; to a gathering to remember the life of a scientist, mother, grandmother, colleague, mentor, muse, and companion. Such is the wonder and grandeur and solace to be shared in such a place.