The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place―Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one’s own and enters into one’s own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work―and the writer―as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author’s encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author’s engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing―the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks “the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer’s wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings.” "The Last Atoll draws a vivid portrait of what might just be my favorite place on Earth (and that's saying something), the secret islands Northwest of Hawaii. It's a place that still feels like the original world, like Earth before us. There the nations are of seabirds, the world is almost entirely ocean, and the air roars with the calls of them in their millions. It feels like Life at full burn. But as Pamela Frierson's work shows, there is much more, even, than first greets the eye."-- Carl Safina "As with her previous book, The Burning Island, Pamela Frierson again takes readers to one of the most remote and ecologically fragile places on the planet. Gracefully written in the tradition of Rachel Carson, The Last Atoll is a personal trek to a chain of tiny, northwest Hawaiian islands, where Frierson brings us nose-to-nose with endangered Hawaiian monk seals, coral polyps, green sea turtles, and golden gooneys--alongside the fossils of long-extinct species, the bones of animals on the edge of vanishing, and the ravages of guano mining, coal dredging, and military bases. The Last Atoll skillfully travels through myth, culture, and history, and arrives at present-day attempts to preserve islands that are as biologically significant as the Galápagos."-- Frank Stewart "It took author Pamela Frierson more than a decade to work her way up the jewels in the necklace of the Northwestern Hawaiian archipelago and write up her experiences, but the end result was worth it. Frierson, who is a lifelong Hawai`i resident, is not just an elegant wordsmith, but also a dedicated environmentalist who has spent years volunteering in the remote atolls. Her toils - painstaking (and often painful) weeding, tagging, counting, chasing seals - are recounted in The Last Atoll, giving readers an unvarnished picture of the challenges faced by the animals and humans alike who dwell on and around these tiny 'water-girt worlds, ' to use Frierson's felicitous phrase."-- Environment Hawai`i "Intertwining myth, science, history and personal narrative makes complex worlds tangible in The Last Atoll and The Burning Island. Instead of struggling through the academic, specialized language that nature writing can sometimes employ, readers are there, wide-eyed and learning alongside Frierson. These stories offer a connection to our place in this fascinating ecosystem, and through that connection, a sense of belonging."-- Honolulu Weekly "It's wonderful to have another book from Pam Frierson about her beloved Hawai`i--this time about its farthest Northwestern atolls--fragile, contaminated, and plundered worlds unchronicled and previously ignored in our letters. She lives among its monk seals, short-tailed albatrosses, rails, petrels, and Laysan ducks, hopping island to atoll, lagoon to fringing reef over the course of ten years of patient exploration and research. From this, an inspiring personal odyssey, she brings us a book in the ecological tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that is also like a piece of extended war reportáge--for these islands were once indeed a combat zone and its dear creatures victims of our cold and riotous pillage. Homage to Ms. Frierson and homage to this living, precious world she brings to us."-- Garrett Hongo , author of Coral Road Mark Tredinnick is an essayist, poet, and writing teacher. He is the author of The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir and the editor of A Place on Earth: An Anthology of Nature Writing from Australia and North America . His essays and journalism have appeared in Island , ISLE , Orion , Resurgence , the Bulletin , and