The Sagebrush Ocean
A Natural History of the Great Basin
35th ANNIVERSARY EDITION COMING IN 2025!
1991 Sierra Club Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation
1990 High Desert Museum's Earle A. Chiles Award
foreword by Barry Lopez
illustrations by Jennifer Owings Dewey
"The Sagebrush Ocean will be a revelation to those who have habitually steeled themselves to drive across the desert at seventy miles an hour, generally at night. They have been missing something fabulous. . . It ought to be in the pack of every desert camper and every off-road recreationist, just to teach them respect for what they use so freely. It ought to be on the seat of every car that starts across from Salt Lake to Reno, or vice versa, to give even seventy-mile-an-hour travelers some notion of what that apparently monotonous sagebrush ocean contains of the diversity and mystery of life." —Wallace Stegner
"...one beauty of a book, a triumph of regional literature of the kind we need, to relate more closely to this land of ours." —Harold Gilliam, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Stephen Trimble combines the scientific reason and clarity of a Voltaire with the poetic sensitivity of Rousseau." —Amazon.com
"... few other regions of our continent have been treated in the format that Trimble has pioneered. For the Great Basin, it's all there under one cover, lavishly and lovingly served up in text and picture." — Arthur Kruckeberg, Douglasia
"The strength of The Sagebrush Ocean is its overall grasp and its remarkable clarity. ...if his photographs, both poetic and scientifically apt, don't arouse reverence for the Great Basin, one wonders what could." —Thomas Lyon, Sierra Magazine
"The Sagebrush Ocean, a handsome, lucidly written, and amply illustrated book, does the place justice with authority and style, outlining its human and natural history with equal facility and sometimes with prose that gives nothing away to John McPhee or anyone else." — Wilderness Magazine
"Trimble has come close to capturing the majestic diversity of the Basin in an exquisite language of written and photographic imagery, and I am terribly afraid he will attract the casual visitor to places that I find it impossible to be casual about." —David Madsen, Utah Historical Quarterly
When The Sagebrush Ocean first appeared in 1989, the cover promised “the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin.” For this 35th anniversary edition, Stephen Trimble has updated his book to address two generations of change and discovery. In sustaining the book’s original promise, he explores a vast amount of science and natural history in a text of synthesis and celebration.
In the 21st century, the sagebrush ocean has become an endangered landscape. Some recent photographs label Nevada and Utah West Desert basins “the cheatgrass sea.” And so we must add a clarifying and sorrowful asterisk to the title. That sweeping image now rings bittersweet.
Sagebrush communities may be diminished by half, but they certainly aren’t gone. And the Great Basin Desert holds far more than sagebrush. In this journey from sunstruck playa to wind-whipped tundra, we learn how plants and animals live and evolve in this arid homeland. Biogeography best sums up Trimble's focus: what lives where, and why.
Authoritative and intimate, The Sagebrush Ocean captures the space, silence, and solitude of this wild and remote country. Trimble’s photographs illuminate some of the continent’s most spectacular but little known scenery. Trimble won the 1991 Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation from the Sierra Club for the original edition.
The heartbreaking decline of sagebrush communities drives the updated text. The impacts of invasive cheatgrass, expanding piñon-juniper woodland, firestorms, climate change, livestock grazing, and modification by people pose enormous challenges. These same complications make The Sagebrush Ocean timely, engaging, and essential.
(University of Nevada Press, 10th anniversary edition, 1999)
