Nature's beauty with a message

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.