Wild land

IT IS NOT A particularly original approach to take note of all things bygone while espousing the idea that Right Now Sucks, that the good old days lie always some years behind us. American artists have made a pretty good living by identifying or, alternately, prophesying this trend of woe - as good a living as American politicians used to make denying it ("Morning in America," Points of Light, blah blah blah). Books are what one sometimes makes when all hope seems lost. They're archival, fit for tombs and pyramids. So often they're but notes in a bottle, filed in the dark aisles of a library where almost none venture anymore: But there they wait, existing outside the scrum of time. This is how things were; and, between the covers, with time stopped, this is forever the way things are. "Battlefields," by Yan Morvan, as if to make a point, is an object so heavy its weight broke its spine in the mail. I estimate it to be about the mass of a midrange mortar shell. A wintry sepia of an unoccupied field near Sharpsburg, Md. - the site of the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War - illustrates the cover: a leafless tree with outspread branches, unharvested cornfield bristling with feral bounty against a buck-and-rail fence in the near background, a luminous plot of wintry grass in the foreground. A lot of colorless sky above. If you look hard enough you can almost see the thousands of ghosts whose bodies are fertilizing the homeland. In most of the photographer's images of the contemporary sites of famous acts of warfare throughout history - including Verdun, the Sand Creek Massacre, the siege of Carthage - humanity is absent; at most a cow or two graze in a pasture. The pictures, without the disorder of war, are so void of harm or malice as to preserve the viewer's innocence. (Although violence can be found lurking beneath a few of the seemingly placid surfaces, at least symbolically; consider the rumpled green hills at the siege and surrender of Vicksburg, which bear resemblance to the tortured contours of the confused and fevered human brain.) Stephen E. Strom's eloquent "Bears Ears: Views From a Sacred Land" is perhaps a more palatable picture book - if not also in its own way a perverse bummer, another chronicling of territory taken by force. In 2016, President Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (signed by Theodore Roosevelt) to set aside 1.35 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, intending to protect for all time more than 100,000 sacred Native American sites, not to mention a contained landscape upon which the narrative of time has been written more eloquently and indelibly than anywhere else on earth. What Yellowstone is to wildlife, Bears Ears is to geology. However, just half a year later President Trump, in one of his first acts in office (and with characteristic racism), reduced the scope of the protected monument by 85 percent - one of the many illegal executive orders that will remain caught up in courts for years. Peter and Beverly Pickford's "Wild Land" may be the most bearable and beautiful of the three large coffee-table books; although to be fair, neither beauty nor tolerability is the primary concern of the first two. All three, I think, strive not just to slow the escalation of time, but to stop it - and, through art, they succeed. "Wild Land" is a whopper of a book, beginning with a stunning frontispiece of countless penguins associating in the Antarctic, looking like so many urban commuters, though without the frenzy. Some are facing each other, communicating with apparent leisure. Subsequent pages of wandering musk ox in the Arctic, polar bears (what world designed such creatures, and how long did it take?), sea turtles, moonscape deserts and undersea schools of fish as infinite as the flocks of birds in the sky all cause the reader to stare agape, changed. It is this last book that gives me the most hope. The authors had to travel to the farthest corners of the earth to find the bounty, vitality and ferocity of a natural world still struggling with each day's merciful rising and setting - as well as a host of new storms, floods and fires, to be certain. But it is an older world than the one the rest of us encounter, and it is a wonder for our own newly arrived species to gaze, with dull incomprehension, at such grace and power, and the deep history of our curious planet. RICK BASS is an environmental activist and the author, most recently, of "The Traveling Feast." These books strive not just to slow the escalation of time, but to stop it - and, through art, they succeed.