The Will of the Land [Hardcover]

"The talented Swiss photographer Peter Dettling came to America in 1993 in search of wild beauty. He found what he was looking for in Canada's oldest national park, Banff, located in Alberta's Rocky Mountains. Dettling's open-hearted quest has resulted in stunning images of the mountains and of the wolves, bears and mountain sheep he has come to love. He stayed on in Banff, only to watch in horror as those same animals die under the wheels of trains, on the over-travelled highway the authorities created to facilitate industrial-scale tourism, and at the hands of wildlife managers as bears and wolves wander into the unmitigated disaster that is urban development in the Bow River Valley. Dettling graces us with a chronicle of these events, an even-handed book that nonetheless leaves the reader shaking with rage. That anger must be focused to become effective; it begins, as Dettling points out, in our own passive hearts that stand silently by as oil exploration, housing development and transportation interests lobby local and provincial governments into complicity against the ecological integrity of the wildlife not only of Banff but of Alberta as a whole. Only in June 2010, for example, did the provincial government belatedly list Alberta's grizzly bears as threatened—a population that may already be doomed. Dettling's story is a microcosm of that blindness. This beautiful, compelling book should make you mad as hell." —Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years, Walking It Off and The Essential Grizzly

"Peter Dettling takes the best damn pics of the Other creatures of anyone I know on our planet. They are windows through the barriers we have built between ourselves and the Others. Through Peter's windows we experience the heart, guts and soul of these, our fellow Beings, and cannot but realize that they and we are of one blood. And that they deserve -must have- our sympathy and understanding if they are to survive the witless ruin we are making of their land and ours. This book speaks for them and their desperate need as no other I have seen for many years has done." —Farley Mowat, author of People of the Deer, Never Cry Wolf, A Whale for the Killing, Gorillas in the Mist and Eastern Passage

"Wolves and bears versus bureaucrats and big business-that's the situation in Banff National Park. Peter Dettling has seen it firsthand and he tells it like it is. Part nature-writing, part wildlife biology and part polemic, The Will of the Land is extraordinary, a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of wildlife in the national parks of the Rockies." —Ben Gadd, naturalist, guide and author of Canadian Rockies Geology Road Tours, Handbook of the Canadian Rockies and The Canadian Hiker's and Backpacker's Handbook

Peter A. Dettling is an award-winning photographer whose passion for nature has taken him from the Galapagos Islands to Canada's Far North, and from the US Grand Canyon to the Swiss Alps. His images have been published in many international magazines and books and featured in gallery shows across North America and Europe, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.