Lay of the Land

The earth holds many secrets. Humanity leaves its traces and marks in the forests, the mountains, the lakes and the prairies of the world. For eons, these landscapes have shaped civilizations and now, there are signs everywhere that our industrialized civilizations are changing the landscape. Three recently published books grapple with the outsized impacts that human activity has had on the earth. Two of them are monographs: “An Unflinching Look: Elegy for Wetlands” by Benjamin Dimmitt and “Rivers Run Through It” by Mark Ruwedel, and the third is a retrospective exhibition catalog, “An My Lê: Between Two Rivers” by Roxana Marcoci.