A State of Being: Author, photographer present rare glimpses of Nevada

Monday, May 6, 2002 | 8:28 a.m.

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The landscape casts a rhythmic spell in the Great Basin. You can feel it driving Highway 50 across Nevada. Grinding up a steep grade to the summit. Seeing a broad valley, and more mountains, one range after another, like waves to the horizon. Then coasting down the other side and out across the wide expanse.

Basin and range, basin and range; it's hypnotic, like the sea. A harsh expanse of dry desert and high mountains between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin has always been a land in between, a region apart, not included in visions of the other Western regions, the Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, the Southwest, or the West Coast. The landscape is more than half empty. So we fill it with images and ideas. Jon Christensen, from "Nevada."

Free-lance writer Jon Christensen and photographer Deon Reynolds have combined their talents to create a book that is part essay and part photography, giving readers a graphic look at a Nevada seldom seen.

"Nevada" (Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 144 pages, $39.95) features 132 striking photographs by Reynolds and four essays by Christensen, who has written for many publications, including the New York Times.

Christensen also produces the public radio series "Nevada Variations," heard locally on KNPR 89.5-FM. The eight-minute program, which runs throughout the day on the first Monday of each month, focuses on stories from different counties in Nevada.

He and Reynolds will be in Las Vegas on Thursday to discuss the book, which was released in the fall.

The discussion is sponsored by Tumblewords, a project of the Nevada Arts Council's statewide literature program. As part of the program authors travel to communities around the state and read from from their works.

Christensen, a resident of Carson City, will read from his essay "Basin and Range," which he wrote for "Nevada."

"That is the heart of the book for me," the 41-year-old Christensen said.

In researching the essay, Christensen said he learned something new about the Silver State.

"I had not realized what an important role Nevada had played in the science of conservation," Christensen said. "The mountains of Nevada are like islands in a sea of sagebrush. Waters are like islands in the desert for animals and plants that live there. It's very unique."

Christensen compared the "islands" of the mountains, lakes and rivers to the actual islands studied by Charles Darwin when Darwin was developing his theory of evolution in the 1800s.

"All natural habitats become like islands in the natural landscape," he said. "They are interesting places to study biological diversity and evolution."

Nevada bound

Nevada is Christensen's adopted state.

The journalist was born in Minnesota, but moved frequently when he was growing up. His father was a salesman for Procter & Gamble.

"We never lived anywhere more than a few years," he said. "We even lived overseas for a time."

Christensen started out as a producer for documentaries on public radio. He was working in San Francisco when he met his wife, Kit Miller, who was a native of Nevada.

The couple moved to Carson City 12 years ago and Christensen became a free-lance writer for such publications as High Country News, a newspaper that focuses on environmental issues in western states.

His years as a free-lance journalist prepared him for the book he and Reynolds produced.

"When I first came here the publisher of High Country News, Ed Morris, asked me to start writing about the Great Basin region, which was a black hole in their coverage of the west," Christensen said.

The Great Basin includes all of Nevada and parts of western Utah, eastern California and southeast Oregon.

"I set out to fill in the hole," Christensen said. "There has not been a lot of media attention to this region."

Gathering information for stories, Christensen said he drove thousands of miles and crisscrossed the state countless times while working on a special project for High Country News in the mid-'90s.

Christensen said he wrote a dozen different stories about everything from Las Vegas to ranching. During the course of his research, Christensen became somewhat of an expert on environmental issues and the environment's impact on business. As a result the New York Times asked him to become a correspondent, writing about science and business issues.

"My interest has always been people, communities and business and how all those things change as the environment changes," Christensen said. "When I started out in the '80s as (a radio) journalist, it was a time when the environmental beat was growing."

People and nature

Christensen said he is not a nature writer in the strictest since of the term, but he is interested in how nature affects people.

"In 1989 my wife and I spent a year in Brazil writing about people and the environment there, focusing on the rain forest," Christensen said. "In places in the Amazon Basin where we were, for the environment to be healthy you had to have healthy people, a healthy community and a healthy economy."

He said he brought that interest back to Nevada.

"That's the kind of story High Country News was interested in," Christensen said. "They were not interested in following the (environmentalists') party lines, but in telling stories about people as I found them.

"All those stories had some important component of science to them -- geology, chemistry, mining, water -- and that kind of led me more and more deeper into science and the relationship of science and the environment."

His interest in people and the environment led Christensen to create the online publication, Great Basin News (greatbasinweb.com). And it also recently garnered him a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., for the 2002-03 academic year.

A dozen journalists were chosen for the fellowship, which allows recipients to pursue independent courses of study. Christensen was notified of his fellowship last week. He will spend a year evaluating various environmental conservation projects to determine if they are working.

Christensen said he became involved in his radio program about eight months ago.

"This thing with Nevada public radio is returning me to my first love," Christensen said.

He said he was contacted by KNPR program director Florence Rogers after she discovered some of his writing on the Internet.

"She asked me if I would be interested in producing some programs on rural Nevada for KNPR," he said.

As a result, he is doing a series of radio shows focusing on the history of each of the state's 17 counties.

"My love of radio was, and is, these kind of rich portraits that bring you into a place," Christensen said.

He said Reynolds, his collaborator on the book, also found him on the Internet.

"Deon had been working in this region of Northern Nevada over the same time as me," Christensen said. "We both had been crisscrossing the state for 10 years, he as a free-lance photographer and me as a writer."

Christensen said Reynolds was interested in compiling a book about the Great Basin.

"We both discovered that this region is very compelling to us," he said.

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