About the Book - About the Author - Events & Discussions
If Chip Ward hadn't happened upon "Desert Solitaire," Abbey's classic account of life as a park ranger in Southern Utah, he might never have traveled west of the Mississippi. As fate, and literature, would have it, Ward gave the book to his brother-in-law and eventually migrated to Capitol Reef National Park in the southern reaches of the state.
Ward and his wife lived in a modest motel-unit-cum-makeshift ranch affectionately called "Sleeping Rainbow." Beguiling vistas and painterly red rock were part of everyday life for the young couple. But it wasn't until they moved to northern Utah, on the rim of the Great Basin, that Ward realized that wilderness was in tr ouble. The beauty that had once surrounded him became a siren song. "We inadvertently moved from the grandest wilderness area in the contiguous United States to the most extensive environmental sacrifice zone in the nation," Ward writes in his book, "Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West."
The book, part memoir, part expose, is about "deserts and how we use them. It is about the people who live on the desert rim, whose unacknowledged suffering should signal a loud warning to us all," Ward writes. Written in swift prose, "Canaries" details how the state has become a testing zone for bombs, a dumping ground for nuclear waste, and what everyday citizens can do about it.
Excerpt from: Waste, beauty and eco-awareness with a novelist's touch by Greg Marshall Park Record May 8, 2009
Chip Ward came to one of the planet's most unforgiving deserts, the flat salt pans west of Salt Lake City, Utah, to drive a bookmobile. He has emerged from it, years later, as a spokesman for that forbidding landscape, the repository of decaying plutonium, retired biochemical weapons, and other manifestations of what he calls the "ecocidal schemes" of big business and government. Ward, working with other concerned Utah citizens, has been fighting an uphill battle not only to remove such threatening substances from desert dumps, but also to prevent new lethal trash from being hauled in from other parts of the country. That struggle has not been universally popular among his fellow desert dwellers: while across the country voters have rejected plans for proposed toxic-waste incinerators for toxic wastes, in that part of Utah, he writes, "we had a tradition of trading environmental quality for jobs and revenue"--and there is, he acknowledges, money to be made in lethal detritus, from which substantial fortunes have been born.
Ward documents his group's efforts to clean up their corner of the American desert, a quest that took him into the halls of Congress and before voters across the country. The struggle is ongoing, with no end in sight. He pleads his cause in the pages of Canaries on the Rim to good effect. Above all, he emphasizes that the desert should no longer be seen as a wasteland fit only for hiding our mess. "It is not desolate at all," he insists. "Desolation is what we have carried to it."
--Gregory McNamee
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