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Erosion is the recent essay collection from Terry Tempest Williams, an author and activist who has been writing about the environment and humanity’s relationship to it for decades. This collection encapsulates both the private and the public, including fierce calls to defend America’s public lands, as well as Williams’ most private ruminations about the deaths of loved ones. In this collection, Williams takes to task the political opponents of environmental preservation, calling out the Trump White House as significant accelerator of dangerous environmental practice. Thus, the collection is both a timely call to action and a timeless reflection on natural phenomena that far outspan the life cycle of the human race.
Williams is a native of the American West, who lives part of the year in Castle Valley, Utah. She discusses witnessing the trauma that is being done in her own backyard, how oil companies who have been making large private land purchases are corrupting the life cycle of the area. Donald Trump has been quick to slash national parks land, and his recent legislation cut eighty five percent of the massive Bear Ears National Park, removing millions of acres of land from the public domain, which had been granted by President Obama only a few years prior. This legislation means that native tribes in the American Southwest will lose lands that they have been living on for generations, losing access to their spiritual and ancestral homes.
Williams’ centers the collection around the idea of erosion, not just the literal erosion of the environment, but the recent political erosion of environmental measures, including legislations such as the one enacted at Bear Ears which largely scale back society’s progress. But this erosion is not only political, Williams sees it as moral erosion, a loss of compassion for our environment and our fellow human beings. She encourages activism through art and storytelling as a means to combat this erosion, to reshape how larger society views the environment. But she also writes, “What are the qualities most needed in this epoch of the Anthropocene? One of the qualities we might seek to cultivate is our capacity to listen.”
While the collection does not shy away from the harsh realities of climate change, it ultimately embraces a hopeful perspective in its conclusion. Williams celebrates efforts in recent years to erode institutional oppression, and ultimately imagines activism to be the only solution to the situation we are in. The collection is itself a piece of activist art, a testament to the strength of storytelling as a means for change. Williams concludes, “This does not require belief, it requires engagement. How serious are we?”