Not Shutting Down: Staying Engaged in an Era of Environmental Loss

press release: Can the beauty of Earth re-inspire us even in the most trying times? Environmental historians (and journalists) face the challenge of telling stories that are true (and therefore too often lack happy endings) and yet do not cause our audiences to go numb and stop listening. After writing recent books on climate change and extinction, deBuys will speak about his efforts to grapple with these dilemmas and share his (admittedly provisional) answers. Please join us for a talk and conversation aimed at thinking through these topics together.

William deBuys’s eight books include The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures (listed by the Christian Science Monitor as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2015), A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American West (2011), The Walk (2008), Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell (2001), Salt Dreams (1999), and River of Traps (a 1991 Pulitzer finalist). He was a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Fellow. His conservation work over many years has included land acquisition, river protection, and grass banking. He serves on the advisory board of the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation and lives and writes on a small farm in northern New Mexico that he has tended since the 1970s.