Lucy R. Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator. She has authored 22 books, has curated more than 50 major exhibitions, and holds nine honorary degrees. She is known for her eclectic interests which span from cultural geography to feminist art to conceptualism.

Lippard describes this unusual paperback as "a collage of concerns about the ways humans intersect with nature in the arid Southwest." She has lived for two decades in Galiseo, a tiny New Mexico village. Her quest to know the place better led her to the gravel pits, places littered with the remnants of human enterprise. They remind her of ruins and yet they speak to her: "Their emptiness, their nakedness, and their rawness suggest an alienation of land and culture, a loss of nothing we care about."

Featuring more than 200 color images, Lippard shows the clash taking place out in the American West between two groups. On the one side are the companies that are gouging resources of all types out of the land where dinosaurs once walked. On the other are the environmentalists and other land lovers including Native Americans who are struggling to protect their ancestral lands and sacred sites.

Lippard laments the short-term thinking of the federal government and the Western states as far as land use goes. Many advocates of progress look at all environmental cautions to be "anti-business." They don't seem to be upset about the substances entering the bodies of southwesterners through fracking fluids and other toxins. Environmentalists, in contrast, are very worried about contamination of aquifers and the tainting of drinking water in a region of the country already facing water shortages.

Lippard ends this troubling journey with a profound quotation from Aldo Leopold:

"We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we can see land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect."