The book narrates the forty-year quest of internationally exhibited contemporary photographer Peter Goin to document human-altered landscapes across America and beyond. It is a collaborative work between an artist and a literary critic, a retrospective of an accomplished environmental photographer and an education in visual reading.

Cheryll Glotfelty, the nation's first professor of Literature and Environment, enjoyed a twenty-eight-year career at the University of Nevada, Reno, before retiring in 2018. Her coedited The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology is a progenitive work in the environmental humanities. Her two coedited volumes, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place and The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg, explore bioregional approaches to harmonizing culture with nature. Glotfelty's literary criticism and reviews have appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Women's Studies, ATQ, Southwestern American Literature, Western American Literature, Literature and Belief, and edited collections. Her art criticism has appeared in Material Ecocriticism and Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. She is a cofounder, past president, and honorary lifetime member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

1 Introduction: Leave your shoes at the door; 2 Biographical sketch: It's not about me; 3 On the road; 4 Evolving landscapes; 5 American ruins; 6 Urban wild; 7 A line on the landscape; 8 Landscapes of fear; 9 Militarizing the American West; 10 Landscape is architecture; 11 Humanature; 12 The postmodern West; 13 Sensual anthropomorphs; 14 Arid waters; 15 Changing mines; 16 Water into light; 17 Ancestral artisans; 18 New nature; 19 Artifacts of the future; 20 Epilogue: Goin home; Appendix A: Peter Goin's books, archives, and collections; Appendix B: Keys to reading the visual language of photography, by Peter Goin