{"product_id":"oasis-of-stone-visions-of-baja-california-sur","title":"Oasis of Stone: Visions of Baja California Sur","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBook info:\u003c\/strong\u003e Oasis of Stone: Visions of Baja California Sur (Hardcover, 202 pages) – Sunbelt Publications, 2007. Language: English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n Gorgeous full-color photography by award-winning photographer Miguel Angel de la Cueva, and evocative text by Bruce Berger, bring the southern half of Baja California to life. Beginning with its unique geology, and moving on to the coastal, desert, and mountain ecosystems of Mexico's little-known peninsula, this lush coffee-table book highlights the flora and fauna of the region.  \n        About the Author   Bruce Berger grew up in suburban Chicago and graduated from Yale University with a B. A. in English. He did some graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, played piano professionally for three years in Spain, and has extensively traveled the western world. Berger is best known for a series of books exploring the intersections of nature and culture, usually in desert settings. Those works include the essay collection The Telling Distance, which won the 1990 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 1991 Colorado Book Award; There Was A River, whose title piece is a narrative of what may have been the last trip on the Colorado River through Glen Canyon before its inundation by Lake Powell; and Almost an Island, which recounts three decades of exploration and friendship in Baja California. Texts integrated with photographs include A Dazzle of Hummingbirds and Sierra, Sea and Desert: El Vizcaíno. Two books are set in Berger's adoptive hometown of Aspen, Colorado: Notes of a Half-Aspenite, and Music in the Mountains, a history of the Aspen Music Festival. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Sierra, Orion and numerous literary quarterlies, and he was a contributing editor at American Way. Berger's poems have appeared in Poetry, Barron's, Orion and various literary reviews, and have been collected in Facing the Music. He has won the 2005 Colorado Authors' League Prize for Poetry and been a featured poet in Light.           Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.   Most contemporary borders are drawn by the brawling, distracted hand of man. Baja California Sur, by contrast, is defined on three sides by the meeting of land and water, and on the fourth side it is separated from its sister state on the Baja California peninsula by the 28th parallel - which is to say, not by a division of local power but by a line on the grid with which we measure the great globe we live on. As one of the thirty-one states of Mexico, Baja California Sur is very much a participant in contemporary politics, but the prominence of its generating forces has kept plain what is everywhere the case: that nature is the source of our lives, the weave of our flesh, the air we breathe, the limb we sit on.\u003cp\u003eThe significance of the state's natural abundance is reflected in the legal protection extended to over forty percent of its land. Its seven protected areas include El Parque Marino Nacional Cabo Pulmo, Mexico's first underwater national park, and La Reserva de la Biosfera El Vizcaíno, the largest single mass of protected land in Latin America. Though home to less than 0.5 percent of the nation's population, Baja California Sur embraces one quarter of its seacoast. The Sierra la Laguna contains a greater percentage of endemic plants than any other protected Mexican habitat. Baja California Sur also possesses more islands than any other state, and one of those islands - Espíritu Santo - has become the first to be expropriated by the federal government to preserve its natural habitat. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe eye confirms these statistics, for the brilliance of nature is seldom out of sight. The air, sweeping in from that clean third of the planet that is the Pacific Ocean, is crisp and transparent, providing sharp distances by day and radiant heavens by night. Scarcity of rainfall has kept man from overwhelming the landscape, leaving expansive habitats to creatures that specialize in aridity. Even in the capital city of La Paz, most urban of the state's environments, the skyline is dominated by twin granite peaks, while a sandspit encloses its inner bay with billowing clouds of mangroves. Comprising the southern half of the Baja California peninsula, that reach of marvels split off from mainland Mexico, Baja California Sur seems almost a separate creation, a world apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo lands are truly separate, from the standpoint of geology, but subterranean forces seem to have conspired in Baja California's isolation. We know from the recently accepted theory of plate tectonics that the earth's crust - its continents and its ocean floors - are like the vast tiles of a mosaic that covers our planet's molten interior. Riding the liquid rock that rises against them, over the course of eons the plates shift in relation to each other, forming ever new configurations of ocean and land. It is in the meetings and partings of those plates that new planetary crust is born. When the plates are thrust against each other, one will slide beneath the other, lifing it and heating its undersurface so that the melted rock erupts in explosions of vulcanism. When plates are pulled apart, the exposed surface gives way to more volcanic eruptions. When the plates slide against each other laterally, the tension and slippage produce earthquakes and further vulcanism. Our planet is even more unstable than it appears from the headlines, for plates usually collide, separate and slip against each other where elevations are lowest and least observed - which is to say, under the sea.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith its soaring and fissured rock, its clefts of darkness, its burnt ochres and coagulated reds that drought has exposed to the sun and wind, Baja California has the appearance of an ancient land, survivor of primeval calamities. Geologically speaking, it is newborn. It was created, unsurprisingly, at the meeting of two plates: the massive North American plate, which carries mainland Mexico, and the equally massive Pacific plate, itself a splintered agglomeration of smaller plates. The materials of what would become Baja California gathered independently, haphazardly. The peninsula's oldest rocks, ruddy with their burden of iron and manganese, rode the Pacific plate eastward toward their future as the Sierra San de José Castro and Isla Cedros at the peninsula's midriff. Metamorphic rock from a chain of volcanos, equally ancient, moved toward similar fates as cores of the Pacific Islands of Margarita and Magdalena. In the mid-Cretaceous, some ninety million years ago, a string of volcanic islands erupted from the fracture between the plates, while more molten rock solidified beneath them, forming the basement rock for the peninsula's volcanic spine. These formations eroded away, leaving the foundation for what would become Baja California. Gradually the Pacific plate slid under the North American plate, generating the material that now greets our eyes. The coastal shelf of the North American plate was lifted into a highland. The heated topside of the Pacific plate rose without breaking through the surface, solidifying into the granite masses, or batholiths, that compose the Sierra la Laguna. As the plates further collided, an immense sequence of blowouts heaped the volcanic ashes and lava flows of the Comondú formation, which forms the bulk of Baja California's major ranges north of the Cape. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe process reached a pivotal turn when the Pacific plate stopped driving into the North American plate and began to slide laterally against it. Five centimeters a year may not sound like much displacement, but geologists have calculated that the Pacific plate moved an impressive 350 kilometers northwest in relation to the North American plate over a six million year period. It is believed that the first incursion of seawater into this sideslipping breach occurred some twelve million years ago, forming the gulf in its first version. Water entered and left, then entered to stay as the Gulf of California some five million years ago, leaving the profile of a Baja California we would recognize.\u003c\/p\u003e      ","brand":"Bruce Berger, Miguel Angel De La Cueva","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46070346645738,"sku":"9780916251765","price":35.67,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5301\/6298\/files\/51CBVGCEHPL._SL1500.jpg?v=1781257952","url":"https:\/\/textbookme.store\/products\/oasis-of-stone-visions-of-baja-california-sur","provider":"TextbookMe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}