Carl E. Bock and Jane H. Bock. 2005
Far to the south of Arizona’s sprawling metropolises, a rolling savanna of grass, oak, and mesquite rises above the surrounding deserts. The Sonoita Plain is a basin of a thousand square miles bracketed by mountains, a land once the domain of cowboys that is now more and more the focus of exurban development. Through essays and photographs, this books seeks to reveal the complex ecology and aesthetics of this unique region. People have dominated the world’s grasslands for so long that today we have no clear idea what these lands might be like without us. By understanding the lessons of the Sonoita Plain, we might gain such insight – and, more important, discover approaches to protecting the very things that attract us to such lands in the first place.
Reviews
“This good-humored, highly knowledgeable book is suffused with great affection for the grasslands of southern Arizona and their inhabitants, the various grasses, theBotteri’s sparrows, the diamondback rattlesnakes, and even the people of this most admirable ecosystem. I enjoyed every page.”
John Alcock, author of Sonoran Desert Summer.
“In an era when advocates for nature sometimes do convincing imitations of the most smug and self-righteous religious believers, condemning sin in others and ignoring it in themselves, the Bocks and Strom are a refreshing exception . . . [They] show us how to be both Naturalist and Humanist, warning us, instructing us, amusing us, and raising our spirits at the same time.”
Patricia Nelson Limerick, author of Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West.
Sonoita Plain: Veiws from a Southwestern Grassland
(with photographs by Stephen E. Strom)
ISBN-0: 8165-2362-2
University of Arizona Press, Tucson, Arizona
Available in paperback from Amazon