Satellites in the High Country
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An uplifting but realistic response to the Anthropocene debate that has shaken the conservation community, offering a new definition and exploration of 'wildness' for the twenty-first century. Jason Mark is a prolific freelance writer and respected speaker who is well-connected within the conservation community. Mark's writing is poetic, insightful, and a pleasure to read; he has the all-too-rare ability to take a careful and thorough look at his subject without taking himself too seriously.

About the Author

Jason Mark's writings on the environment have appeared in The New York Times, Atlantic.com, The Nation, and Salon.com, among many other publications. He is the long-time editor of Earth Island Journal, a quarterly magazine, and a co-founder of San Francisco's largest urban farm. A long time ago, Time magazine called him "a rebel with a cause."

Reviews

"Satellites in the High Country is a brave and vigorous exploration of wilderness--its meaning, its necessity, its thunderous, rock-strewn reality. Jason Mark guides the reader across mountain passes and Arctic tussocks on a journey that is at once physical, philosophical, and political. His feet may be bruised, but his voice is strong, honest, and compelling. Read this book for an insightful and much-needed update on the centrality of wilderness in the contemporary American mind."--Kathleen Dean Moore, author of "Great Tide Rising"

"Satellites in the High Country is an act of ground truthing on the nature of wildness at this moment in time. Author Jason Mark circumnavigates the American West with the eyes of an open-hearted sleuth, looking for what wild remains. Wildness, he discovers, is not only all around us, but inside us as well, having little to do with what is pristine or untouched and everything to do with nature's intricate system of adaptation and response, function and beauty, and our innate capacity for awe. This book is a conversation with sanity."--Terry Tempest Williams, author of "When Women Were Birds"

"In Satellites in the High Country, gripping accounts of outdoor journeys are linked with provocative thinking about the meaning of wildness in an increasingly human-controlled world. Jason Mark ably continues the writing style and themes of legends such as John Muir and Edward Abbey."--Roderick Frazier Nash, author of "Wilderness and the American Mind"

"Through it all, [Mark] does a nice job of balancing historical fact and sociopolitical commentary with poetic passages that celebrate the breathtaking beauty of the natural world."
-- "KQED Arts "The Spine""

"In Satellites in the High Country, Mark narrates his adventures in America's wilderness with stunning detail. The dilemma of whether to leave nature to its own devices or tend it in order to preserve its ecological integrity is sensitively portrayed. Now more than ever, we need voices like Mark's to illustrate this ever-complex relationship between mankind and nature, and to inspire us to care for our wild places."--Jamie Williams, President of The Wilderness Society

"Jason Mark is a great person to share an adventure with, whether out on the Arctic tundra or on the page. Satellites in the High Country is an engrossing exploration of the ever-evolving definition of what is 'wild' in America--which often reveals as much about us as it does about wilderness in the twenty-first century."--Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club

"In his new book, Satellites In The High Country: Searching For The Wild In The Age Of Man, Mark takes us on a journey across America in search of wilderness, from a reservation in South Dakota where the reintroduction of bison has divided the community to a cave in Washington state where a British cavewoman is replicating life in the Paleolithic more than two million years ago. Along the way, he explores the meaning of wilderness and the urgent need to conserve what remains of it."-- "National Geographic"

"In this compellingly readable account of his quest to explore some of the planet's last remaining stretches of authentic wilderness, environmental writer Mark argues that safeguarding a powerful sense of 'the Wild' as separate from civilization is more critical than ever....Mark presents a fresh, first-rate piece of nature writing and a stirring manifesto calling for the protection and celebration of the true spirit of wild places."
-- "Booklist"

"Mark carves out a fine distinction between inadvertent influence caused by factors like climate change and intentional control. He offers a heartfelt ode to the continued importance of nonintervention in wilderness areas, even if doing so leads to unrecognizably changed landscapes."
-- "High Country News"

"Mark journeys through wilderness that most of his readers will never see, and in doing so demonstrates why in just knowing there is wild, somewhere, we can remain grounded in our existence on the planet....If Mark romanticizes the refuge found in the wild, he makes no apologies for it. Satellites in the High Country is an evocative meditation on reconnecting our bond to the natural world, and why it is so important. But Mark's is more than a romantic vision. It is also a pragmatic understanding that, to save ourselves, we'll need to reconcile our fractured relationship to the wild in the Age of Man."-- "Triple Pundit"

"One of the pleasures of Satellites in the High Country is that Mr. Mark does not follow the usual nature writer's path and just throw the word "wild" out there, waving it like a flag, before carrying on with his own happy tramps into the wilderness. His approach to decoding the word is comprehensive, ...The ideas are the best part...trips are well-described and linked clearly to the book's intellectual lessons."-- "Wall Street Journal"

"Throughout, Mark neatly blends the particular place details with broad maxims of wilderness philosophy, slanted toward the needs of earth's future, and expressed with an eloquent originality. What's more he does it with some charming descriptive passages."
-- "Sierra Club's Words of the Wild"

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