Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, “The Hour of Land,” is an impassioned call to preserve and protect our national park system, America’s network of natural splendor, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

‘The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks’

by Terry Tempest Williams

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 397 pp., $27

The National Park Service marks its 100th anniversary this year. Among commemorations of this milestone comes Terry Tempest Williams’ beautifully illustrated new book. Some readers may be surprised that her visit to 12 selected parks and monuments is less a celebration than a platform for its well-known activist author to address a variety of serious concerns such as encroaching oil and gas development, growing water shortages, global warming and privilege versus poverty.

And yet, what better time to take stock? We might expect more of a guide and history, less of the writer’s anger and her focus on its causes, but have to be satisfied with what she deems important. When she visits Gates of the Arctic National Park, for example, we get more about some cryptic crisis with her brother than a sense of place, whose implied beauty prompts her to observe: “Consumption is a progressive disease.” The craving for opening this fragile territory to drill for oil makes some people almost indifferent to the land’s needs. Repeatedly, she calls for us to listen to the land, to respect it, to behave more responsibly. Williams will discuss her book at Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, June 16.

Too, Williams, author of “Refuge,” wants to set the historical record straight when possible. In the introduction, she notes, “I grew up with the myth that when Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872 it was void of people.” Not true, she writes. Indians were banned or removed. “Reservations were being established at the same time as national parks.”

Author appearance Terry Tempest Williams The author of “The Hour of Land” will appear at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 16, at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave. Tickets are $5 at townhallseattle.org and at the door. Information: 206-652-4255.

Since her Mormon family has many long-term ties with several places she includes, such as Grand Teton, Acadia and Canyonlands national parks, she weaves her intimate connections into these accounts. The Grand Teton piece, particularly, is a satisfying blend of history and memoir. Williams recounts how John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s land purchases near Jackson Hole both formed and enlarged the park, despite locals’ initial resistance; too, she recalls a hike with a “party of four generations” on her father’s 80th birthday.

Another family outing, this time to Glacier National Park, coincides with the 2003 Trapper Fire. With hard-to-get reservations at first Granite Park, then Sperry Chalet, and reassurances that distant fires should pose no threat, the group sets off from Logan Pass along the Highline Trail. But as smoke thickens and flames approach, the situation grows dangerous, escape impossible. Everyone takes shelter on the floor of the stone building once the roof is doused, prompting Williams to consider the park’s disappearing glaciers. “Climate change is not an abstraction here,” she observes of these lands, taken from the Blackfeet Nation when the park was established.

While the chapter on Gulf Islands National Seashore focuses on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the series of letters tied to Canyonlands raises issues about movements to sell public lands, off-road vehicle damage and other “acts of greed,” water use, toxic emissions from oil and gas development apparently causing increased infant mortality, and other problems. Williams awakens readers to present issues easily obscured by the National Park Service’s carefully cultivated, idyllic image.

When she says, “Our institutions and agencies are no longer working for us,” she hopes to shake us from our fondness for souvenir T-shirts. Rather, it’s “time to re-imagine our public lands as sanctuaries, refuges, and sacred lands.”