Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

Author reading at the Mono Lake Committee: Relicts of Beautiful Sea with Christopher Norment

This post was written by Barbara Ball, 2014 Information Center & Bookstore Manager.

Along a tiny spring in a narrow canyon near Death Valley, seemingly against all odds, an Inyo Mountain slender salamander makes its home. “The desert,” writes author Christopher Norment, “is defined by the absence of water, and yet in the desert there is water enough, if you live properly.” Relicts of a Beautiful Sea explores the existence of rare, unexpected, and sublime desert creatures such as the black toad and four pupfishes unique to the desert West.

Join us here at the Mono Lake Committee this coming Wednesday, October 15 at 1:00pm for a chance to meet Norment and hear him read excerpts from his book. Here at the edge of the desert West, it should be a fun afternoon with great conversation!

In this climate of extremes, beset by conflicts over water rights, each species illustrates the work of natural selection and the importance of conservation. This is also a story of persistence—for as much as ten million years—amid the changing landscape of western North America. By telling the story of these creatures, Norment illustrates the beauty of evolution and explores ethical and practical issues of conservation: what is a four-inch-long salamander worth, hidden away in the heat-blasted canyons of the Inyo Mountains, and what would the cost of its extinction be? What is any lonely and besieged species worth, and why should we care?

Christopher Norment is a professor of environmental science and biology at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, and is the author of In the Memory of the Map: A Cartographic Memoir and Return to Warden’s Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows.

For more information, please contact Barbara at (760) 647-6595.