From the Introduction: "Relicts of a Beautiful Sea is a story about the natural world, woven out of science, poetry, aesthetics, and personal experience. It is a tale about the beauty of the Great Basin, its life, and my longing to belong fully to a place and find resonance in its creatures - in other words, to locate myself in this world and so claim a home. And in this age of extinction and collapsing species ranges, my story also is an argument about biodiversity's inherent right to exist. This right was codified by the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act, but many people still wonder - why should we cherish and protect the many threads of life's deep and intricate history, and just what are all the lonely and besieged species worth? This story and my argument are built around six desert animals, all of them small and restricted to aquatic habitats: a salamander, four types of pupfishes, and a toad. The animals depend upon the same desert waters that people desire, and so they are rare and mostly threatened."
From the Preface: "I walk for hours across the hardscrabble ground, beneath a sun-blasted sky, taste salt on my burnt skin. But then I am taken, suddenly, by a trace of seep willow, the rustle of cottonwood leaves, a tiny spring hidden in some rough canyon. I stoop down, cup water in my hands, feel its cool welcome on my face, and then turn a flat rock. A small creature coils, refugee from the deepest past, from another, wetter time. I catch my breath and time spirals. The day is consecrated. All the world's lost, aching beauty comes flooding in and life's long skein claims my heart."