On The Mesa is a autobiographical celebration of life in a fragile and marginal place. On the deserted sagebrush plain just west of his Taos home, John Nichols has found a healing serenity and an astonishing variety of life and mood that casual observers rarely notice.

Like much of the West, the Taos Mesa is being threatened by development, electric lines, oil and gas exploration. The human stakes are a few sheep and cattle ranchers and a handful of pioneer homesteaders, surrounded by some stock ponds, hungry coyotes, burrowing owls, and at least one pair of bald eagles. Nichols's "Walden Pond" is a stock pond which holds water but a few weeks out of the year. Yet the wild things which survive around this small puddle are a powerful metaphor for the tenacity of life on earth. Their story reaffirms the need for us all to both cherish and defend even the prosaic of nature's hallowed places.

For Nichols, the mesa is a microcosm of life that opens him up to the entire universe, human history, questions about evolution, and the survival of the planet. Hit story about the healing powers of the natural world arises from a tradition which includes Thoreau, John Muir, Everett Ruess, Annie Dillard, and Edward Abbey.

By the well-known author of The Sterile Cuckoo and the critically-acclaimed New Mexico Trilogy which includes The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, and The Nirvana Blues, this memoir is written with humor, gentleness, and some outrage, and is a lyrical addition to the environmental literature of the West.

John Nichols has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1969. He is active in local land and water struggles, and in the wider environmental issues of the West. His travels often take him outside the U.S., most recently to Nicaragua where he joined with groups seeking peaceful solutions to the problems of Central America. He has worked on many films, most notably Missing with Costa-Gravas. His passions include hockey, fly fishing, and taking photographs of northern New Mexico.

There is no current email address for the author. Regular mail to John Nichols may be sent to:

Mr.John Nichols
P.O.Box 1165
Taos, New Mexico 87561
USA

Text from the book "On The Mesa" by John Nichols, Copyright © John Nichols.
Reprinted with special permission from John Nichols - All Rights Reserved.