On Active Grounds

A magnificent illustrated journey into California’s famed deserts and the astonishingly abundant life they contain.

2023 Glenn Goldman Award Winner for California Lifestyle, Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller!

From Obi Kaufmann, author-illustrator of the best-selling California Field Atlas, comes a grand adventure through time, geography, and ecology in California’s deserts. Of a piece with his richly illustrated books The Forests of California and The Coasts of California, this volume features hundreds of vivid watercolor maps and illustrations, blending art and science to breathtaking effect. Journeying through the Great Basin, Mojave, Colorado, and Sonoran Deserts, Kaufmann pays special attention to national and state parks and monuments, and to the dozens of wilderness areas that reveal the underappreciated natural abundance of California’s arid lands.

From Joshua Tree to Death Valley, these deserts full of life, as Kaufmann evokes them, are perfect places for meditating on our future, and for imagining a California that might thrive beyond the age of climate breakdown. The Deserts of California is a canonical entry into the literature of the American deserts, uniquely colorful and celebratory, and abounding in hope and wonder.

Learn about the wildlife of the Bay Area from a lifelong protector of endangered species, and enjoy the wild ride.

Jeff Miller's quirky guide to the coolest animal neighbors in the Bay Area will have you gawking at elk, whooping with cranes, and crowning yourself a crossing guard for newts before you know it. Join Jeff on a local safari to meet more than sixty species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects, and discover the fascinating and sometimes bizarre mating, feeding, and athletic antics of our most charismatic animals.

Portraits by Obi Kaufmann, the renowned conservationist artist who created The California Field Atlas, bring each animal to vivid life alongside fun facts, comical photos, and maps to help you scope out the best spots to find your furred, feathered, slimy, and slithery friends. Imbued with the author’s deep compassion for the well-being of our local fauna, Bay Area Wildlife reveals why each of these creatures matters, as well as the threats that loom over our region's incredible biodiversity.

An insightful look at the historical damages early colonizers of America caused and how their descendants may recognize and heal the harm done to the earth and the native peoples

Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley—how the land fared during the onslaught of colonization and how it fares now in the drought, development, and wildfires that are the consequences of the colonial mind. Author Louise Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people during a period of genocide. As settlers, her ancestors lived the dream of Manifest Destiny, their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations.

When Dunlap’s generation inherited the land, she had already begun to wonder about its unspoken story. What had kept her ancestors from seeing and telling the truth of their history? What had they brought west with them from the very earliest colonial experience in New England? Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer.

It’s a powerful story that will awaken others to consider their own ancestors’ role in colonization and encourage them to begin reparations for the harmful actions of those who came before. More broadly, it offers a way for every reader to evaluate their own current life actions and the lasting impact they can have on society and our planet.

How do we live with fire? From the creator of The California Field Atlas, a book of stewardship, resilience, and hope.

Fire is an essential part of California's ecology. Humans have been using it to shape the California landscape for thousands of years. But today many Californians' relationship to fire is one of fear. Obi Kaufmann, author of the best-selling California Field Atlas, now asks: How do we live with fire? What makes fire essential to a healthy and biodiverse Golden State, and how do we benefit from its teachings? With the same solution-minded ethic as his much-admired The State of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource, Kaufmann presents fire as a force of regeneration rather than apocalypse. He considers the long history of ecological burns, the varied ways fire behaves across the state, and the lessons we can learn from California's largest fires of recent decades.

Packed with Kaufmann's signature watercolor maps and paintings, The State of Fire confronts one of California's most pressing social and ecological challenges. From this maelstrom Kaufmann emerges to share a deepened love for the natural world—and a refreshingly hopeful vision of California's future.

Nature isn't only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.

Joanna Brichetto is a neurodiverse, late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye. Despite having chronic illnesses, she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.

Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse either). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us—the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection celebrate nature—just as it is—on the sidewalk and in the backyard, the park, and the parking lot.