Terry Tempest Williams is one of our staunchest and most impassioned defenders of public lands. A naturalist, a fervent activist, and a skilled and stirring writer, she has spoken to us, and for us, again and again in books like The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In this latest collection of essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She is overwhelmed and exhausted by the current state of American politics, the dire environmental implications of the current administration’s choices, and the drought she sees outside her door and feels within herself. Images of extraction and contamination haunt her: “oil rigs lighting up the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste on dirt roads now crisscrossing the desert like an exposed nervous system.” Moments of relief and of refuge are found in art - and in the very land we’re losing. In Erosion, a collection of essays written from 2016 through 2018, Williams wrangles with the paradox of the desert lands: “That being worn down, broken open, and reshaped as we face our undoing is also the making of who we are becoming.”