Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland

Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland is a conservation photography book from the University of New Mexico Press, with text by writer Gregory McNamee and photographs by Stephen Strom and Stephen Capra. Its subject is the vast Chihuahuan grassland of south-central New Mexico, one of the largest intact Chihuahuan desert grasslands left in the country, and the book arrived as that landscape faced pressure from proposed oil and gas development. A foreword by then-Governor Bill Richardson grounds it firmly in the state's environmental politics of the era.

Strom's quiet, wide-format images favor weather, light, and the subtle textures of grass and sky over dramatic spectacle, an approach suited to a place McNamee calls "a strange and empty place." This is a clean first printing from 2008, printed in Singapore, complete with the panoramic plates and the closing McNamee passage on the back cover.