Environmentalist author Amy Irvine has a new book out this week, from North Pointe Press.
The negative impact of Mormon culture on the envirnoment appears to be among her themes.

Publishers Weekly review:
In this clouded memoir, Irvine, former development director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), pursues her tortuous trajectory from a loosely Mormon upbringing to strident environmental activism. Irvine writes from the fresh grief of her father's suicide: a fierce atheist with a Mormon pedigree, her father divorced her mother when Irvine was 10, drank heavily and gradually grew estranged from his family before shooting himself in the heart. With her mother and sister, Irvine grew up a Jack Mormon (one whose belief in the Church of the Latter Day Saints has lapsed), endured a brief marriage with a yuppie vegetarian and found true love with a lawyer named Herb, with whom she moved to San Juan County, Utah. As Irvine, a grant-proposal writer, and Herb both worked for the SUWA, their advocacy for public lands pitted them in uncomfortable opposition to the pro-development, cattle-friendly interests of their largely Mormon neighbors. Irvine structures her memoir cannily around the four eras of local Native American prehistoric culture (Lithic, Archaic, Basketmaker and Pueblo), each reflecting a period of migration and settlement in her own life. However, her work is filled with so much tertiary detail that emotional resonance is rare. Still, her views on wilderness preservation ring passionately and her research is sound. (Feb.)

Library Journal review:
It took a flight to the desert after the suicide of her estranged, alcoholic father and a crisis in her marriage before activist Irvine (Making a Difference: Stories of How Our Outdoor Industry and Individuals Are Working To Preserve America's Natural Places) finally accepted herself and the harsh forces that have shaped her life. Nestled amid descriptions of the stark, red-rock desert of the Colorado Plateau, speculation about ancient inhabitants, and reflection on the Mormon migration west is Irvine's own story, which she unfolds gradually while moving seamlessly between past and present. Growing up in Salt Lake City under a cloud because she was a "half-breed"-half Mormon and half Gentile-Irvine suffered from chronic alienation that worsened after she moved to a desolate country of God-fearing Mormons who viewed outsiders, especially environmentalists, with suspicion. In a story at once compelling and exasperating, Irvine is like a fictional heroine bent on self-destruction. Finally, at the height of crisis, an epiphany occurs, and the author reveals what was heretofore hidden-that this is a story of love and reconciliation. This beautifully written work deserves a place among memoirs and Western writings in public and academic libraries.

Publisher blurb:
Trespass is the story of one woman’s struggle to gain footing in inhospitable territory. A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah’s red-rock country after her father’s suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved and unique desert landscapes and for our vanishing connection to it. Fearing what her father’s fate might somehow portend for her, Irvine retreated into the remote recesses of the Colorado Plateau—home not only to the world’s most renowned national parks but also to a rugged brand of cowboy Mormonism that stands in defiant contrast to the world at large. Her story is one of ruin and restoration, of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil and how that fear fuels an antagonism toward environmental concerns that pervades the region. At the same time, Irvine mourns her own loss of wildness and disconnection from spirituality, while ultimately discovering that the provinces of nature and faith are not as distinct as she once might have believed.

Back-cover comments:
“Trespass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage. What saves this book from simply becoming an indulgence is her fidelity and love for all things beautiful and broken, especially the redrock desert of southern Utah. If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy Irving has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light.” —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

“Trespass is the story of one woman's escape: from the Mormon Church, from her father's demons, from her own self-sabotage. Irvine’s take on early Native Americans in the Southwest and hunter gathering as a way of life is extraordinary and original, as is the way she uses these thoughts to better understand her own place in the world. Trespass is also a tangled, fevered, ambivalent love story—the true kind.” —Nora Gallagher, author of Changing Light and Things Seen and Unseen

Irvine and Terry Tempest Williams will appear at the Salt Lake City Library, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m., to kick off her book tour.