The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands
By Stephen E. Strom and Jonathan T. Bailey
The University of Arizona Press
368 pp., 2022
At the heart of the dramatic Utah red rock landscape is the Greater San Rafael Swell—a land of both geologic and human tumult.
A landscape of great natural beauty, Utah’s red rock country is a place where the passage from deep time to the present is revealed in stunningly sculpted and colorful geological strata that span 350 million years of Earth’s history. At the heart of this dramatic landscape is the Greater San Rafael Swell—a land of both geologic and human tumult.
Natural and human history come together in The Greater San Rafael Swell, which spans much of Emery County in Utah. Authors Stephen Strom and Jonathan Bailey paint a multi-faceted picture of a singular place through photographs, along with descriptions of geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, and dozens of interviews with individuals who devoted more than two decades to developing a shared vision of the future of both the Swell and the County. At its core, the book relates the important story of how a coalition of ranchers, miners, off-road enthusiasts, conservationists, recreationists, and Native American tribal nations worked together for nearly 25 years to forge and pass the Emery County Public Lands Management Act in 2019.
This book chronicles hopeful stories for our times: how citizens of Emery and three other counties in the rural West worked to resolve perhaps the most volatile issue in the region – the future of public lands. Both their successes and the processes by which they found common ground serve as beacons in today’s uncertain landscape – beacons that can illuminate paths toward rebuilding our shared democracy from the ground up.
PRAISE FOR THE GREATER SAN RAFAEL SWELL
The Emery County Public Lands Management Act of 2019 must seem like a miracle to anyone familiar with the bitter and contentious history of public land management in Utah and the West. Traditional adversaries, rural residents, environmentalists, miners, Democrats, and Republicans somehow came together and began talking—and listening—to their traditional adversaries. The result is a new map of Emery County, bringing together a mosaic of wilderness designations, state parks, and lands opened for development to assure a future for rural communities. Steve Strom and Jonathan Bailey’s careful telling of this story will surely become the essential guide for spreading this example throughout the West.
— Bruce Babbitt, Former Secretary of the Interior and Arizona Governor
In addition to its stunning illustrations, the book makes an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the literature on the collaborative conservation movement in the West by focusing on successful examples that originated at the county level. At a time when our national discourse is tearing us apart, these efforts demonstrate that ranchers and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, recreationists and conservationists can find common ground—and save that common ground—if they walk that common ground together and are willing to compromise.
— Thomas Sheridan, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, The University of Arizona
Stephen E. Strom has spent forty-five years as a research astronomer after receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in astronomy from Harvard. He began photographing in 1978, after studying the history of photography and silver and nonsilver photography at the University of Arizona. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections, including the Center for Creative Photography and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His photography complements poems and essays in six books published by the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, Sonoita Plain, Tseyi / Deep in the Rock, Earth and Mars: A Reflection, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land, and The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands. He has also published Death Valley: Painted Light, Tidal Rhythms, Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land, This Desert Hides Nothing, and Earth Forms.
Jonathan T. Bailey is a photographer and conservationist who specializes in rock art. His work has contributed to the preservation of areas like the Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Uintah Basin, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Since 2013, he has partnered with the Utah Rock Art Research Association to record and protect Emery County’s fragile archaeological resources. He is most recently the author of When I Was Red Clay. His work has appeared in numerous places such as Landscape Photography Magazine, NBC News, Arizona Highways, and High Country News. Originally from Emery County, Utah, he now lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, Aaron.
