Access Utah

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet.

Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.

Today on the final day of UPR’s Spring Pledge Drive, my Access Utah co-host is Craig Jessop, Dean of the USU Caine College of the Arts, and Music Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra. We’ll present a portion of a recent interview with eminent historian Joseph Ellis, author most recently of “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.” We’ll also hear a segment from an interview with ecologist Jeremy Jackson, co-author of “Breakpoint: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises.” And we’ll hear part of Lee Austin’s interview with Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac.

Folklorist and USU Assistant Professor of English Lynne McNeill joins me for this special pledge drive edition of the program. We’ll hear a segment from a recent episode featuring Chef Nephi Craig, founder of the Native American Culinary Association. We’ll also feature a portion of one of our most memorable episodes, an interview (from 2011) with Utah author Lee Cantwell. His novel “Mother George” tries to flesh out an incredible true story for which there is little information: Mother George was a black midwife who practiced her art in a small southeastern Idaho town for 40 years. When she died around 1919, the women dressing her for burial discovered that she was a man. We’ll also hear an episode from our Bread & Butter series.

On this special pledge drive edition of Access Utah. My co-host is Access Utah founding host and former UPR Program Director Lee Austin. We’ll feature new conversations with USU Associate Professor of Journalism Matthew LaPlante and BBC host Dan Damon. We’ll be talking about the media landscape in the U.S. and the U.K. We’ll also talk about all the latest twists and turns in the Brexit saga.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite recent episodes of the program. We’ll hear from Amy Irvine, Regina Whiteskunk Lopez and Kirsten Johanna Allen, talking about themes in Amy Irvine’s book “Desert Cabal,” which is a response to Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire.” Ken Sanders was a friend of Edward Abbey. We’ll also present part of an interview with another of Ken Sanders’ friends, legendary river-runner Ken Sleight, talking about Glen Canyon. We’ll invite you to pledge your support to UPR to ensure that Access Utah continues strong.

On the first day of UPR’s Spring Pledge Drive Tom Williams and co-host USU Communications Studies Assistant Professor Jason Gilmore will present parts of several recent Access Utah interviews: We’ll hear some of our listeners expressing opposing viewpoints. StoryCorps founder David Isay will urge us to try to overcome our differences by truly listening to each other. And we’ll talk about UPR’s upcoming partnership with StoryCorps in their One Small Step initiative, which invites two strangers to share life stories across a political divide. Finally, we'll hear from Richard Saunders on the way contemporary contexts inform our understanding of history.

Today on Access Utah: the music of Gustav Mahler from his Third Symphony. Our guests include USU Music Professor Sergio Bernal, Austrian conductor Christoph Campestrini with Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, and mezzo-soprano and USU Alumna Tamara Mumford of Metropolitan Opera. Immerse yourself in a universe of awakenings, nature, humankind, and eternity envisioned by Mahler, a composer for whom ''a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.''

Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel is Director of Climate Science for the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She will be in Utah later this week for events in Salt Lake City and Ogden. She says we can adapt to and reduce risks from changing weather patterns and other consequences of releasing heat-trapping emissions to the atmosphere, and that we can switch to a lower emissions trajectory. Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel will give us specific examples for Utah on the program today.