Her work focuses on social and environmental justice ranging from issues of ecology and the protection of public lands and wildness, to women's health, to exploring humanity's relationship to culture and nature.
"The challenge was to impart large ecological concepts to young burgeoning minds in a language that wasn't polemical, but woven into a compelling story.
She has committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987–1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War.
She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
She is working with the Planetary health Alliance and the Center for the Study of World Religions in establishing The Constellation Project, where the sciences and spirituality are conjoined.
The book interweaves memoir and natural history, explores her complicated relationship to Mormonism, and recounts her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer along with the concurrent flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a place special to Williams since childhood.
The book's widely anthologized epilogue, The Clan of One-Breasted Women, explores whether the high incidence of cancer in her family might be due to their status as downwinders during the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s.
Refuge received the 1991 Evans Biography Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.
"[11] Williams' writing on ecological and social issues has appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; Orion magazine; and The Progressive.
She has also collaborated in the creation of fine art books with photographers Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Debra Bloomfield, Meridel Rubenstein, Rosalie Winard, Edward Riddell, and Fazal Sheikh.
"[16] On February 18, 2016, as part of the Keep It in the Ground movement, Williams attended a federal auction of oil and gas leases and purchased several parcels totaling 1,751 acres in Grand County, Utah through a company she formed called Tempest Exploration in order to keep them from energy development.