Editor's note: The following review was written by John C. Miles, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University. He is author of Guardians of the Parks: A History of the National Parks and Conservation Association (1995) and Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve (2009) among other books. He lives and writes about parks and wilderness in Taos, New Mexico.

Anyone who has heard Terry Tempest Williams speak or who has read her writing knows how personal her approach is to her subject, thus the “personal topography” of the subtitle of this book.

Visits to 12 units of the National Park System, including seven national parks, two national monuments, a national military park, national seashore, and national recreation area, provide grist for her exploration of this topography and a sampling of different elements of the system. Despite the metaphorical title and subtitle, Williams vows in her introduction “to listen to both the inner and outer landscapes that spoke to me, to not hide behind metaphor or lyricism as I have in the past, but to simply share the stories that emerged in each park encountered.”

And that’s what she does, though she can’t contain her lyricism.

The first essay is about Grand Teton, four generations of Tempests continuing their annual explorations of this iconic park. The family connection to this place is strong, their annual visits instilling in them, as in many American families, a love for a particular national park.

“Not a year of my life has passed without the Tetons’ jagged presence, not one.”

To Terry, Mardy Murie and Laurance Rockefeller, now gone, were historic figures and her friends, and she uses their stories to share a bit of the park’s history. Laurance and his father made this park what it is (and many other parts of the system also), and after Laurance died in 2004 she was asked to write a prose poem for the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, which she did. Its lyrical 27 lines are scattered through the essay.

Terry and her father visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the heart of the Bakken oil boom of North Dakota. (Then-) Superintendent Valerie Naylor gives them a tour and describes the challenges of this particular park, leading Terry to observe that, “Most of the issues confronting our national parks today are political.”

At Acadia National Park she explores family connections and reflects how, “Our national parks hold our stories in inexplicable ways.”

Gettysburg was a three-day battle that “left a permanent scar in the psyche of America, now memorialized within a national park.” The Grand Canyon, on the other hand, took three billion years to be what it is, also framed as a national park. She asks, “What is time but a compressed view of history seen through the lens of story, personal or geologic. Both have their power and truths, both have their limitations. The perspective we are given depends on the person telling the story – season by season.”

She visits Gettysburg in four seasons, experiencing different sides of the story from historians, reenactors, interpreters, and friends. Husband Brooke and friend Rick ask, “Why all this rapture about war?” Fascinated by this place and its stories, as many of us are, Terry wonders at its power for her, why she keeps coming back. “Maybe it has something to do with what the dead – many still buried here – want us to know.”

So the journey progresses, to Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, a “cultural resource,” sacred to 20 tribes, which is not in their view managed by the Park Service to maintain “the dignity and peace of their ancestors.” To Big Bend and Gates of the Arctic, representing national parks as sanctuaries for the wild. To Gulf Islands National Seashore, at the center of the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

When I started reading The Hour of Land I knew it would not be all joy and self-congratulation at how wonderful we Americans are to have created this extensive national park system. Terry Tempest Williams is an activist. She celebrates nature, but tells the story as she sees it and shares how she feels about it.

At Gulf Islands the anger, frustration, and sadness is deep. “Yes,” she seems to be saying, “we are so fortunate to have these parks, but for how long?”

She interviews Dr. Paul Kemp of the National Audubon Society about what can be done to stop a system obviously breaking down. Action, not incremental steps, he says.

I look at him and smile. “You know what you are advocating . . . “

“What?” he asks quietly.

“You are basically calling for a complete restructuring of Western civilization.”

He doesn’t flinch.

As she thinks about Canyonlands National Park, Terry writes letters to Ed Abbey, newspaper editors, friends, John Wesley Powell, and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, among others. This was, for me, the most captivating chapter. She tells Abbey what Ken Sleight, upon whom he based his character Seldom Seen Smith in The Monkey Wrench Gang, said to a group of students she took to see him.

“The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction. Ed told me right here on this ranch, the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration.”

Writing to a friend, she tells of encountering Lady Bird Johnson late in her life. Lady Bird had some advice for Terry. "Beautiful language isn’t enough,” she said. “You have to be very smart about what you are doing when talking about the environment. You have to reach people where they are – not where you are.”

She thanks Powell for his inspiration: “I have learned from your history, Major Powell, that it is only through the power of our own encounters and explorations of the wild that we can cultivate hope because we have experienced both the awe and humility in nature. We can passionately enter in to the politics of place, even the realm of public policy and change it, if we dare to speak from the authority of our own residencies.” All her thoughts in these letters relate to the Canyonlands of the past, present, and future.

Terry says passionately that of all places, our national parks should bring us joy, adventure, and discovery, but they should also inspire us to humility and action. Paul Kemp at Gulf Islands counsels action based on his “residency” in the Gulf. Powell acted on his “residency” in the American West, and Williams and Tim DeCristopher, the latter jailed for interfering with a BLM sale of energy leases, are acting in our time from their “residency” in the Intermountain West.

“The purpose of life is to see,” the writer Jack Turner said to me on a late summer walk at the base of the Tetons. I understand this to be a matter of paying attention. The nature of our national parks is bound to the nature of our own humility, our capacity to stay open and curious in a world that instead beckons closure through fear. For me, humility begins as a deep recognition of all I do not know. This understanding doesn’t stop me, it inspires me to ask more questions, to look more closely, feel more fully the character of the place where I am.

In this book, Terry Tempest Williams asks us to pay attention to our places and to what is happening to them. Our national parks are as close to shared sacred spaces as we as Americans have. Even these are under siege, their values – our cultural and natural heritage – at risk. The national parks help her, and can help us, gain perspective on our situation.

She says, “This is the Hour of Land, when our mistakes and shortcomings must be placed in the perspective of time. The Hour of Land is where we remember what we have forgotten: We are not the only species who lives and dreams on the planet. There is something enduring that circulates in the heart of nature that deserves our respect and attention.”