Storming the gates of paradise : landscapes for politics / Rebecca Solnit.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. This anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium--not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view.--From publisher description.

Introduction: Prisons and paradises -- [part] 1: Uneven terrain : the West. The red lands ; The postmodern Old West, or, The precession of cowboys and Indians ; The struggle of dawning intelligence : creating, revising, and recognizing Native American monuments ; The garden of merging paths -- [part] 2: Borders and crossers. A route in the shape of a question ; Thirty-nine steps across the border and back ; Nonconforming uses : Teddy Cruz on both sides of the border -- [part] 3: Trouble below : mining, water, and nuclear waste. The price of gold, the value of water ; Meanwhile, back at the ranch ; Poison pictures -- [part] 4: Reaching for the sky. Excavating the sky ; Drawing the constellations ; Hugging the shadows ; Justice by moonlight -- [part] 5: Landscapes of resistance and repression. Fragments of the future : the FTAA in Miami ; Jailbirds I have loved ; Making it home : travels outside the fear economy ; Mirror in the street ; Liberation conspiracies ; Sontag and tsunami -- [part] 6: Gardens and wildernesses. Every corner is alive : Eliot Porter as an environmentalist and an artist ; The botanical circus, or, Adventures in American gardening ; A murder of ravens : on globalized species -- [part] 7: Women's place. Tangled banks and clearcut examples ; Seven stepping stones down the primrose path : a talk at a conference on landscape and gender ; Other daughters, other American revolutions -- [part] 8: Infernal museums. California comedy, or, Surfing with Dante ; The Wal-Mart biennale ; The silence of the lambswool cardigans ; Locked horns -- [part] 9: City at the end of the world. The orbits of earthly bodies ; San Francisco : the metamorphosis ; The heart of the city ; The ruins of memory ; Gaping questions -- Coda: The Pacific. Seashell to ear.