April 4, 2025
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April 4, 2025

Laguna Wilderness Press is a non-profit press dedicated to publishing books

about the presence, preservation, and importance of wilderness environments.

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Featured Books & Documentaries

— Douglas McCulloh
Senior Curator, Interim Executive Director
UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography

“This book is a rarity—a treasure about a treasure. It’s also about a fight: ordinary small town citizens banding together to save an historic American landscape. Laguna Beach and the Greenbelt tells the tale, its marvelous illustrations reveal why the greenbelt is truly a treasure, and its example will inspire citizens everywhere.”

Captured in the chronologies of individual ranch settlement is the European immigrants “need” to own land and build an agrarian life. The authors thoughtfully explain the evolution of this “need” into the modern land conservation movement, guided by those in agriculture and the philanthropic community.

A “must” read for those seeking to understand the American West. And a wonderful adventure for anyone who cherishes our land and wildlife resources.

Laguna Beach and the Greenbelt Celebrating a Treasured American Landscape

Retail: $35.00, 10” x 11.5”, 132 pages — Hardcover
Released: January 2025

Laguna Beach and the Greenbelt
Celebrating a Treasured Historic American Landscape

Laguna Beach and its greenbelt are recognized as a Historic American Landscape of national significance, and this publication presents the documentation on which the designation is based.

Laguna Beach and its greenbelt are worthy of designation as a Historic American Landscape because the city’s beautiful and dramatic natural setting is intricately related to the community and artistic tradition that grew from it. Its geological formations, natural vegetation, and coastal location attracted artists beginning around the turn of the last century. The artistic influence and the character of the landscape shaped a unique community. Laguna’s history, including isolation from other development, its role as an art colony, and its leadership in environmental preservation all stem from the characteristics and disposition of the landscape itself.

Leigh Reagan Smith – Director Biography

Leigh Reagan Smith graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

She has shot and edited environmental and sports programming in the form of network shows, independent documentaries, and web shorts for PBS, Showtime, National Geographic, and Fuel TV.
Leigh was cinematographer on Bag It, a feature length documentary about world-wide plastic consumption and the health of our oceans.

She edited the PBS documentary, The Drift, a film about the last remaining cattle drive done solely on horseback along the Green River.

Currently, Leigh teaches youth filmmaking camps.

A NOBEL PURSUIT follows fight to save Noble Basin

Director Statement

The goal of this documentary film project is to educate, inspire, and inform other communities across the United States when make decisions pertaining to our last remaining public lands and open spaces.

This film honors all the people who have fought tirelessly, without funding or accolades, for land that connects them to a deeper part of themselves. It is for all those who explore and cherish our country’s forests, craggy canyons, lakes, rivers, streams, and meadows alive with flowers and animals.

I, myself feel a deep connection to the wilderness that surrounds me and to the people who live in admiration and respect to our last remaining natural spaces.

This 48 minute documentary film is the story of a Wyoming community coming together to achieve one of the most significant oil and gas lease buyouts in American history.

VIEW DOCUMENTARY DETAILS AND TRAILER – 00:03:26 Video

Dave Freudenthal – Wyoming Governor

These are American stories recounting the perils of the people who fulfilled America’s vision of Manifest Destiny. Relying on gritty, first person accounts and extensive research, the authors capture the courage, tenacity, heartache, loss and violence of learning to live with an unforgiving land.

Captured in the chronologies of individual ranch settlement is the European immigrants “need” to own land and build an agrarian life. The authors thoughtfully explain the evolution of this “need” into the modern land conservation movement, guided by those in agriculture and the philanthropic community.

A “must” read for those seeking to understand the American West. And a wonderful adventure for anyone who cherishes our land and wildlife resources.

Homesteading and Ranching in the Upper Green River Valley Ann Chambers Noble and Jonita Sommers

Retail: $55.00, 11.75” x 10.25”, 330 pages — Hardcover

This book is a timely document utilizing historic and current photography with cattle brands of the region to celebrate the homesteaders themselves and their descendants and new occupants that have maintained and preserved this area. Homesteading is often a glorified piece of American history, but the history of homesteading in the Upper Green River Valley is often about hardship and heartache. Men and women came here starting in the 1870s to have their own ranches, taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862. They were willing to risk everything they had to start a new life with often little more than a wagon, a team of horses, a smattering of livestock, a young family, and deep hope. The history of the Upper Green River Valley with carefully researched historical photography combined with contemporary photography by photographers: Curtis S. Anderson, Arnie Brokling, Elizabeth Boehm, Ronald H. Chilcote, Rita Donham, Mark Gocke, Fred Pflughoft, David Rule and Isaac Spotts. Sponsored by Jackson Hole Land Trust.

This is a 96 page powerful collection of remote areas of the west, printed in duo-tone with careful care to printing, stock with a wonderful collection of poetry. LWP

MEDITATION ON AN ALTERNATIVE FUTURE
by Erin Currier – painter

Separation Point documents the adventure and camaraderie of two imaginative and introspective friends on an emancipatory quest. Nearly three-quarters of a century after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Benjie Howard and Jason Russell Poole take the wheel on a path well forged: a quintessentially American spiritual pilgrimage, inspired by the open road.

Separation Point Jason Russell Poole - Photography | Benjie Howard - Words and Music

This publication is an extended and updated version of Nature’s Laguna Wilderness title first published in 2003. This book is an activist document. The accomplished photography of a sumptuous landscape may obscure the fact that The Laguna Wilderness consists of equal parts of the three most powerful currents of nature photography over the past half century—art, political advocacy, and love of nature. Ron Chilcote deploys beauty as a political weapon.

READING THE HIEROGLYPHICS OF NATURE
by Godfrey Reggio – director of Koyaanisqatsi

We see the world through language, but our language may no longer describe our world. Over a ten-year period, Jason Russell Poole and Benjie Howard left one world to try to see another. They breached a separation point and used the edges of our world to frame a wilderness beyond. They began to read the hieroglyphics of nature. Their search for literacy is not unlike how humans first learned to read, long before pictographs and alphabets, through metaphors of earth, air, water, and fire. It is into this elemental place that Poole and Howard have submerged, entering the wilderness where language was born.

We hope you will aquire a copy of the Blue-Ray Disc and share with family and friends, it is our desire that everone in Laguna Beach to see it. Donations support continuing documentation of Laguna Beach California present and future.

Shaping the Historical Legacy and the Dilley Vision

  • Confronting an Arterial Highway in Pristine Hills
  • Saving Sycamore Hills
  • Lagislating the Orange Coast National Park
  • Securing Conservation of Coastal Land
  • Resisting Laurel Canyon Development
  • Opposing the Toll Road and Land Aquisitions
  • Preserving The Bluebelt
  • Restoring Natural Habitat and Creeks
  • Recognizing an Historic American Landscape

LAGUNA BEACH — Ten Challenges to its Legacy and Character Blu-Ray Disc 40 min. documentary suggested $20 minimum donation

This is the story of how the small community of Laguna Beach, known as an artist colony with its some 23,000 residents living along the Pacific Ocean and surrounded by a Greenbelt of 22,000 acres of preserved open space amidst sandy beaches, dramatic canyons, mountains, caves and arches evolved as a community conscious of its uniqueness, village character, and leadership in environmental protection. Originally home to Native Americans, later surrounded by large ranchos under Spanish and Mexican land grants, the present town evolved on 39 homesteads from 1875 to 1916 and its ensuing development related not only to its beautiful natural setting but also to sensitivity to urban design. Its natural setting inspired plein or open-air artists.

We hope you will aquire a copy of the Blue-Ray Disc and share with family and friends, it is our desire that everone in Laguna Beach to see it. Donations support continuing documentation of Laguna Beach California present and future.

Blu-Ray Disc 40 Minute Documentary – Suggested minimum donation of $20 or more.

ALANi and the Giant Kelp Elf Gayle and Tom - Illustrator and Writers

ALANi and the Giant Kelp Elf Gayle and Tom - Illustrator and Writers

Kelfie and his Kelp Elf Clan need help. Their undersea home, the giant kelp forest off the coast of Laguna Beach, is being destroyed by over-fishing and pollution. Can their human friend, Alani, help them find a solution so they won’t have to leave their homes forever?

This is an engaging story for young children to teach environmental awareness and civic responsibility. Alani and Kelfie realize that people must speak up to create laws that protect the land and sea creatures who cannot speak for themselves.

The Laguna Canyon Project:

The Laguna Canyon Project

The Laguna Canyon Project Author/Photographer: Mark Chamberlain

In the early 1980s photographers Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield created “The Laguna Canyon Project” to challenge and prevent the suburban development of one of Southern California’s most iconic canyons and pristine open spaces. Combining artistic vision with political activism they produced a historic multi-phased environmental art project (1980-2010) that inspired Laguna Beach residents to take charge of their own destiny and to avert an ecological disaster. Containing more than 130 photographs and inspiring written pieces from artists, activists, and collaborators on the Laguna Canyon Project, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive photographic and written history of the historic movement.

  • The Laguna Canyon Project:

The Laguna Wilderness Author/Photographer: Ron Chilcote

This publication is an extended and updated version of Nature’s Laguna Wilderness title first published in 2003. This book is an activist document. The accomplished photography of a sumptuous landscape may obscure the fact that The Laguna Wilderness consists of equal parts of the three most powerful currents of nature photography over the past half century—art, political advocacy, and love of nature. Ron Chilcote deploys beauty as a political weapon.

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