Reflective activism

Ask Terry Tempest Williams how one should go about saving the natural world. She's a naturalist, after all, and one of Utah's most famous authors, and also, now, the Annie Tanner Fellow at the University of Utah's new graduate program in environmental studies.

So ask her about saving the environment. If you do, she'll talk about balance.

"It's a dance between reflection and action, passion and patience," she said. "We must commit ourselves, as citizens, to the long view."

On Thursday, at the Salt Lake Main Library, Williams will deliver the inaugural address in a new lecture series called Lyceum II. Robert Newman, dean of the U.'s College of Humanities, modeled the series after Ralph Waldo Emerson's lectures on the natural world.

To name your lecture series after one in the 19th century may seem like a small tribute. But actually, this nod to environmental history shows something important about the U.'s program.

Newman said that, as far as he knows, there is not another environmental program in the nation that is offered through a humanities department. All other environmental studies come under a college of science or within a public-policy school.

"We feel we are offering something quite significant," he said. He revels in interdisciplinariness. Historians as well as biologists, architects as well as social scientists, will teach in the U.'s program, as will one of the state's premier writers.

Newman looks forward to having Williams on campus for a few weeks each spring and fall during the three years of her fellowship. He's even more excited about the summer workshops she'll teach near her home in the red-rock country of Castle Valley. Graduate students and undergrads alike will be allowed to take her writing workshops, he said.

And Williams won't be the only special attraction. Newman announces that, this fall, the department will bring in a photo exhibit by Subhankar Banerjee. Banerjee's photos of the Alaskan landscape are so dramatic that they were shown on the floor of the U.S. Senate to help defeat the proposal to drill for oil in the wilderness.

Williams and Newman recently went to New York to see Banerjee's exhibit. Williams said the photos show what it means to stand inside a space. "A flesh-and-blood encounter."

As Williams describes environmental studies, it is all of a piece — Banerjee's photos, the essays her students will write, the fact that the U. structured the program around literature, religion, philosophy and history. "This is how empathy and compassion are developed," she said.