Light Fading

Light Fading: Reflections on the Imperiled Everglades is the only book of its kind dedicated to America's most famous wetland: a hardcover, full-color volume of 320 pages filled with brilliant photography--including many two-page spreads and numerous full-page images, laid out at a generous size that heightens the book's visual impact. Along with his photographs, the author also provides a thoughtful essay that is at once lyrically descriptive, personally touching, and unapologetically scathing in its hard-headed assault on current policy and cultural attitudes affecting the Everglades region. Using the problems besetting the Everglades as an apt example, Curzon frames those attitudes in a global context, and suggests a radical revaluation of our place in the natural world. The result is a book of tremendous visual beauty that simultaneously packs a potent emotional and intellectual punch, a work of significance for lovers of the Everglades, but also for the future of environmental thought in general.

About the Author

Joel M. Curzon grew up primarily in Utah, where the southern Wasatch Mountains look out over the Great Basin.  In college he majored in physics and studied philosophy, graduating magna cum laude in 1995; he later attended Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1999. After practicing law for several years in Silicon Valley, Joel ceased full-time practice in 2003 in order to focus on writing and photography. He met his wife at Harvard—a fellow law student who grew up in Calcutta, India—and they currently reside in
San Diego, California.

Curzon began his photographic work in the Everglades in 2002, and subsequently spent months exploring and photographing the Everglades region during repeated trips in the years that followed. During this time he became a student of the region's ecology; he also became an observer and critic of the ongoing restoration efforts, which he came to see as deeply flawed and inadequate.