For many years I had written off Hawai’i as a truly provocative destination, thinking it was all about palm trees, beaches, water sports, and hula girls. WRONG! Not only is traditional Hawaiian culture alive and well and more integrated into general life in the Islands than most Native or indigenous cultures in the US, but geologically, Hawai’i is filled with fascinating formations, especially in the lava fields of Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. There I found rock formations unlikeI had ever seen before, either in other lava fields, such as Craters of the Moon ..read more

The Madagascar Version of Paradise The two photographs from Madagascar in Earthforms, (pp. 72 & 73) are both of sandstone structures in the magnificent Parc d’Isalo on the southern part of the island. It had taken us two days to drive the 429 miles from the capital, Antaninarivo, to the park on the two-lane National 7 “highway.” We kept passing people on foot pushing or pulling heavy carts of produce on that hilly road, plus vans overloaded with people of all ages. After one overnight stop, we finally arrived at our lodging in the evening, and the next morning we picked up  our guide ..read more

Genghis Khan (ca. 1158–1227), silent, authoritative, paternal, presides over present-day post-imperial, post-totalitarian, successfully democratic Mongolia, the most sparsely populated country in the world (pop. ca. 2.8 million; density 1.76/sq km), with a land area about the size of Alaska. Genghis Kahn is their mono-hero, so it seems, present on all their money (as Mao is in China and Gandhi is in India), his statue and (imagined) likeness everywhere. I had read (or rather listened to) Jack Weatherford’s marvelous Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World before coming on the trip ..read more

My partner, Pam, and I had visited Sardinia last year, finding it full of fascinating rocks and archeological sites. So I figured this year we should look for the same in Corsica, situated just north of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. This island, about a third the size of Sardinia, turned out to be even more provocatively geological, along with its share of Bronze Age archeology, despite also being a major tourist destination for Europeans. It apparently hasn’t been discovered yet by American travel agencies, although many in the hospitality industry there speak good English. But I decide ..read more

Here I am with a golden eagle on my arm in Mongolia. In the northwest of the country men hunt with trained golden eagles, and one fellow had one that he allowed to pose with tourists on the way to the Genghis Khan memorial outside of Ulaan Baator, May, 2014 ..read more

Art, science and progressive politics—why should they be separate domains? Serious art is a way of knowing the world: how to get along with others, what’s out there in the world, what to admire, what to be wary of—in short, how to life. Science explores the particulars, and politics is the endeavor to work with others to make life better—hopefully for most people! They’ve all been my passions since childhood, and this book  brings them all together. And today it is urgent that we bring them together: we need to act collectively to preserve what we can of the livability of this earth. As Gaia p ..read more

Earthforms features four photographs from the Mingan Archipelago (Province of Québec, Canada), including the cover and the title page. These islands offered such an exceptional geological panorama, in such an unlikely place for most Americans, that they deserved the status of framing the whole book this way. When I reviewed the images from this particular destination, it brought back the other places my companion and I had visited that trip, and the feeling I got there that I was in some kind of alternate world. The people we met were North Americans, just like us, but they lived surrounded by ..read more

I’m very proud that the venerable magazine Natural History (established in 1900), long associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has chosen to feature Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet as its June cover story. Editor Charles Harris chose Ordovician Strata, Detail, taken at Green Point, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada for the cover, thus opting right away for rock formation closeup, or miniscape, rather than a more traditional landscape. The book has plenty of both, but geological miniscapes are much rarer in the practice of nature photograp ..read more

Badlands hold a strong fascination for me due to the plethora of FORM one finds there. Generally located in dry, desert terrain, the setting itself offers much to delight the eye. The desert surface displays dried and drying mud, petrified wood, scatterings of quartz and other rocks, and contrasting strata across the vertical walls, high and low. Then perched on top of this are the land formations themselves: the gullies and mounds, and above all the hoodoos & caprocks: earth protrusions that are often the products of the erosion of the ground, leaving the more solid mudstone standing, to ..read more

On pages 42 and 43 of Earthforms there are two photographs of the Ice Canyon at Yolyn Am, Mongolia. Here is the story of the day I photographed them, May 13, 2014, during my trip around the world Our driver Ohchkee (who spoke no English) picked us up in his roomy SUV at Dalanzadgad airport, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, 300 miles south of Ulaan Baator, Mongolia’s capital, and spirited us off to his yurt complex in a nearby town, first passing by Flaming Cliffs, where in 1922 Roy Chapman Andrews had first discovered dinosaur eggs (now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York ..read more