Singing Stone: A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons by Thomas Lowe Fleischner The University of Utah Press, 1999, 212 pages, $17.95 paper

Thomas Lowe Fleischner's book on the Escalante Canyons may have been produced by a conservation biologist, but it is written from the gut. By breathing fire into his facts, this Prescott College professor of environmental studies articulates the intuitive response many of us have to the red rock canyons found in the belly of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Fleischner's prose conveys not just the science of wilderness, but also the sensibilities of wildness. He finds the music in the trill of the red-spotted toad (C minor, he says), and ponders with his young son how snakes might kiss. A man committed to giving his students an education in the field, he recounts a harrowing group traverse of the Escalante River, suddenly swollen with spring snowmelt from a distant Boulder Mountain. Amid his discussions of riparian areas, biodiversity, and ecosystems, these narrative gifts stir our appetites for the wild.

Rescuing us from the abstract terrain of so many natural histories, he writes life onto the page when he finds a white-throated swift shivering in the mud. "The visceral connection between the bird's fluttering heartbeat and the nerve-tips in my fingers focuses me on this animal as an individual being, not a member of a species." For him, it is not merely the recognition nor the naming of the natural world around us, but the "intimacy and repeated interaction" with an exact place that allows us to know it-indeed, to protect it too.

The chapters read like the striated layers of sandstone on the Colorado Plateau, each telling the story of a different era. In a section titled "The Terrain of Delight," Fleischner walks (although one could see him waltzing) through the canyons' geologic history, concocting analogies for our small minds to comprehend the immense scale of time and events. He rightly notes that a view of humanity's exceedingly brief presence on the timeline is "an antidote to hubris." Shrinking our importance even further, "The Texture of Life" highlights the dialogue between plants and animals of the canyons, and touches on the significance of the Escalante River as one of the last undammed rivers in the Southwest. Flowing free, the river and its canyon provide the context for an ageless non-human conversation.

In the chapters "Walking Upright" and "Home on the Range?" Fleischner first traces the mysteries of ancient human cultures in the canyons before charting the arrival of Europeans, and then Mormons. The latter two sagas-made up primarily of a peculiar Christian faith and cows-are central to understanding contemporary rural Utah and its disavowal of efforts to protect southern Utah's public lands. Many local Utahans still see these lands as theirs for the taking-including the sinuous sandstone labyrinths of the Escalante. Fleischner accurately describes, with simultaneous empathy and criticism, how Mormons were persecuted both by eastern gentiles and by the federal government, who, among other things, didn't like the number of wives Mormon men had accrued. To this day, the last bastion of sagebrush rebels has given the finger to any sort of conservation effort or government regulation, including the 1996 monument designation. For example, when livestock grazing during a recent drought threatened long-term damage to vegetation on the remote Kaiparowits Plateau deep in the monument and adjacent to the Escalante Canyons, one rancher shot his cows rather than complying with the Bureau of Land Management's order to move them. Another rancher, whose cattle were impounded after she refused to comply with the same order, stormed the corral at BLM headquarters with the aid of the local sheriff and set her cows free.

Finally, in "Hungry for Fun," Fleischner catalogues how booming recreation and tourism now jeopardize this delicate canyon ecosystem-despite monument status-every bit as much as coal mining and cattle. Unfortunately the chapter ignores off-road vehicles, one of the gravest threats to Escalante and Utah's other remote areas. Yes, even slickrock canyon bottoms are at risk. Here the book has a slightly dry, academic tone as the author embarks upon a necessary discussion of public lands policy and the modern events that have shaped it. His discussion culminates with the current struggle to protect permanently the Escalante Canyons as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act.

In its entirety, Singing Stone is an impressive piece of grassroots advocacy, baiting our appetites for wilderness-and wildness-by offering us tastes of an extraordinary place. And admirably, thankfully, it is intentionally not a guidebook to direct more hoards to its most delicious spots.

Scientists, aesthetes, and red rock desert rats alike, rejoice! Singing Stone is both history and science, as well as an intimate encounter with a wild desert land.

Reviewed by AMY IRVINE, who works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and has just completed a book of conservation success stories, Making a Difference (The Globe/Pequot Press)