"We are most of us only half-breeds, you know, mestizos between the old culture and the new--inheritors of no tradition and not yet like true sons of the soil, able to make our own." Written four years before her death in 1934 to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Mary Austin's words accurately sum up a life spent living at the margins of her own culture; a multicultural perspective allowed her to redefine American attitudes toward nature as she found value in the untouched landscape and those who had for centuries adapted to its ways. More than forty years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Mary Austin was serving as an important force in protecting regions from overdevelopment and promoting their importance. One of her major themes is women's subordination by men in her society; even her nature works The Land of Little Rain (1903), Lost Borders (1909), and Cactus...