In a large format (10” X 11”), this book combines a photo essay by Peter Goin with three essays by Peter Federici to explore Glen Canyon in the time of climate change. How can that be, you may ask? Is Glen Canyon not submerged under Lake Powell? As Goin and Federici show us, the answer is yes and no.

The reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River began filling in 1966. It filled to capacity in 1980. As Federici writes, “this young century has been a hard one so far for the river, and for Lake Powell.”

In January 2000, the reservoir was 95 percent full; it covered 250 square miles and lapped nearly two thousand miles of deeply indented shoreline in Utah and Arizona. But then the Rocky Mountain winters dried up. By 2005, after six years of significantly below-average precipitation in the upper Colorado River basin, the lake level had dropped a record 140 feet. The reservoir shrank to less that 130 square miles, diminishing back to the size it was in the late 1960s when it was first filling. Since then it has risen again, to a level of a hundred feet below its full pool – but this still leaves its volume at only half of what it could be.

Glen Canyon was drowned by Lake Powell, now a portion of it has reappeared. Goin has visited and photographed the lake since 1987, documenting its changes. Frederici and a friend recently kayaked what they expected to be the upper reaches of the lake - they found the Colorado River. He writes “you might say we’d come up here to the upper reaches of Lake Powell to examine what it looks like where a river dies – or, conversely, where it is coming back to life. And through a quirk of geography and timing we’d come to exactly the right place.”

Frederici’s essays describe the descent through a landscape where “a sense of poverty had come to be the new normal.” With a clear, sparse style he describes how drought and evaporation, both linked to a changing climate, have contributed to the decline of the lake and the return of part of the river. At Hite, Utah, where a tourist center was buzzing with activity when the pool was full, he finds a “landscape of grief,” the water and the tourists gone. “What is at Hite now is neither old river nor not-so-old lake. It is a new sort of river, one that poses new questions for us.”

The most immediate question is “what the future looks like for us” in the age of climate change, especially in arid places like the American Southwest where population continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Another is “What are we supposed to do with our knowledge that we live at the end of nature, that the driver of the Earth’s powerful cycles has become us as much as it is the other thing?” What to do in the face of such huge questions?

Maybe what we need to do, then, is to embrace this new ambiguity, to accept that we are as gods but far from omnipotent, that we are rather cocreators, that we are as much nature as what we once labeled as nature because it seemed outside ourselves, but that with new promotion comes new responsibility that might truly be labeled what has become one of the most clichéd words in American English: awesome.

Friederici leaves to us the task of figuring out how to take on this responsibility, perhaps because there are plenty of ideas out there as to how to do so. He at least suggests it will require “drawing back,” and “a recognition that the unbridled use of new power without responsibility results only in disaster.”

Friederici seems to be accepting the current conceits that “we are as gods,” that “nature” has ended, and that we are “cocreators” who drive the earth’s powerful cycles. Unquestionably we affect earth’s cycles, our behaviors driving climate change, but Friederici goes a too far in accepting the postmodern hubris that we humans have become the most powerful force in nature. He admits, though, that what we are creating may be forcing us to define a “new form of beauty,” illustrated by photographer Goin with images of trash and desolation in the Glen Canyon we have created.

When I read the title, A New Form of Beauty, and initially scanned the 68 photographs that Goin contributed to this book, I was put off. One photo is “Shade structure skeleton, Moqui Canyon,” another “Sunken cruiser, east of Escalante River,” and “Buried shoe, Scorup Canyon“- many photos of the bathtub ring at low pool. Is this the “new form of beauty” we are to accept? But to be fair, there are many photos that reveal beauty even in the changed canyon. Reading Friederici’s eloquent essays I understood at least some of what Goin was saying with his photos.

I do not wish to diminish the seriousness of the job before us in dealing with a drier West, or a melting Arctic, or eroding coastlines. I do not want to gloss over the innumerable and inevitable casualties that are going to accompany the too-fast changing conditions of our planet. But I do want to point out that much of what fueled the Powell expedition’s almost manic dash down through the canyons of the Colorado was a mingled sense of mystery and destiny: the conviction that it was only by embracing a dangerous unknown that a fledgling country could grow into what it surely ought to be.

John Wesley Powell could not have known he would make it through the Grand Canyon alive as he pursued “mystery and destiny” on his exploratory expedition in 1869. But he embraced that unknown, and in this very thought-provoking book Goin and Friederici suggest that only by following Powell’s example might we, especially those of us in the American Southwest, survive and prosper as we confront climate change.