Nature’s beauty with a message

Crown of the Continent

The Last Great Wilderness

of the Rocky Mountains

Ralph Waldt

Riverbend Publishing: 168 pp., $29.95

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FOR most of the last two centuries, Americans have shown a nearly insatiable urge to ogle images of nature.

For much of the 19th century, people lined up by the hundreds outside galleries in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore for the chance to glimpse woodland and mountain scenes by artists such as Frederic Church, Alfred Jacob Miller, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran.

So, too, was the country smitten by a string of lavishly illustrated government surveys and expedition reports about the West. One classic effort of the era -- the seven-volume Pacific Railroad Survey, released in the late 1850s -- is estimated to have been seen by several million people.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when advances in printing technology during the 1950s led to affordable book-length photo collections, there would come a veritable avalanche of large-format books featuring wild places.

Across this history, the artists and writers behind such works have typically had more on their minds than simple issues of color and poetry. Celebrated 19th century painter Thomas Cole, for instance, used a vast array of symbols to turn his works into vigorous social narratives. Concerned with continuing threats to wilderness from agricultural development, Cole proffered the idea that to lose nature was to lose the force that helped shaped the American character.

More than a century later, in the early days of coffee-table nature books, would come equally dramatic releases such as the 1963 “The Place No One Knew,” edited by former Sierra Club President David Brower, with photographs by Eliot Porter. Theirs was a poignant, melancholy ode to Utah’s Glen Canyon, which even as the book rolled off the presses was disappearing under the dammed waters of Lake Powell. It was a powerful book, and it did much to stoke the fires of a fledgling environmental movement.

Some critics today, however, wonder whether such books have seen their best days. Given a public that can at times seem woefully out of touch with nature -- or more specifically, out of touch with the kinds of choices needed to save it -- such works can seem little more than bland sedatives. Instead of conveying the staggering complexity of nature, too often the focus of these books is the biggest tree or the gnarliest rapids or the sexiest predator, as if such things were stand-alone attractions.

Not so with “Crown of the Continent,” with text by naturalist Ralph Waldt and foreword by novelist Ivan Doig. Rather than focusing on a specific park or wilderness (in other words, artificial preserves defined by political boundaries), Waldt profiles a critically important 10-million-acre ecosystem in the northern Rockies known regionally as the Crown of the Continent. The ecosystem begins a short distance from Missoula, Mont., and runs north in a roughly 60-mile-wide strip along the Continental Divide, nearly to Alberta’s Banff National Park.

Besides being an important watershed (the headwaters of the Missouri, Columbia and South Saskatchewan rivers are found in this region), this terrain provides habitat and migratory passage for mammals that include lynxes, grizzlies, wolverines and wolves. There is a remarkable biological diversity here.

The Crown is, in fact, a kind of mixing zone, where moisture-loving species of the Pacific Northwest meet those of the dry prairie foothills. The ecosystem contains about 1,200 species of native vascular plants and is a permanent or seasonal home to nearly 250 different birds.

About 80% of the Crown is made up of government land, including Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but the low-elevation valleys are, by and large, privately owned, and from a biological standpoint, are more critical than any set of mountaintops.

As Waldt points out, losing these areas to development -- be it roads, subdivisions or drilling platforms -- means losing critical winter range, basic migration corridors and a host of other ecological values. In other words, though the aesthetic backdrop of a place like the Crown may be fairly secure, that’s not true for the rich panoply of life that animates it.

Waldt makes this case neither as a poet nor an activist. As resident naturalist at the Nature Conservancy’s Pine Butte Guest Ranch on the Rocky Mountain Front, he knows the region as well as anyone, having walked, skied and snowshoed more than 8,000 miles of it. He’s a keen and learned observer, filling his pages not with literary prose but with a lively, highly polished form of personal field notes.

To his enormous credit, Waldt has a fine ability to connect the dots in complex natural settings -- no small thing, especially in these times, when talented writer-naturalists seem few and far between.

Nature writers today often discount the need to establish a deep intimacy with their subject, which flies in the face of what for centuries was considered essential to the study of natural history. As men like celebrated biologist Aldo Leopold argued, without a thorough understanding of the land, it was impossible even to know what sort of questions to ask.

Indeed this dearth of talented naturalists might well have consequences for the modern conservation movement. We see it already. Instead of preservation efforts being cradled by men and women who can speak from platforms made up of both science and personal experience, as they once were, too often what we get today are highly emotional pleas made through cheesecake pinups of bears, wolves and scenic, seasonal vistas.

Various photographers have provided images for “Crown of the Continent,” and they are, by any standard, stunning. Beyond that, the production values of the book are excellent, thanks in no small part to this small Helena, Mont.-based publishing house and its publisher, Chris Cauble, formerly editorial director of Falcon Press.

No doubt many who purchase “Crown of the Continent” will use it mostly as eye candy, positioning it on the coffee table next to the gin and tonics. Yet those who take their time with the book may find themselves in possession of the kind of wonder that drove America’s relationship with nature since the days of Thomas Cole.

Waldt gives us a sense of the wild flowering from its own center -- through a long list of biological processes we understand quite well but also through his intimation of other processes that are still beyond our reach.

Like any conservation effort, the struggle to save this slice of the northern Rockies will depend heavily on politics and science. Yet if history is any teacher, the most significant conservation effort sometimes begins with the imagination. Waldt’s long-standing work as a naturalist, told through the pages of “Crown of the Continent,” is in service of exactly that.

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Gary Ferguson is the author of “The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind” and “Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone.”