Access Utah

President Trump has ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct a review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments (along with many other other national monuments) and to report back with recommendations. Secretary Zinke is in Utah now, consulting with various stakeholders. We’re going to talk about this mandated review of national monuments today. Our guests include Josh Ewing, Executive Director of Friends of Cedar Mesa; Matt Anderson, Public Lands Policy Analyst with the Sutherland Institute; and Willie Grayeyes, Board Chairman with Utah Dine Bikeyah.

If you were lost on a mountain, who would come to your rescue? Mother Nature can be harsh, especially if you're unprepared or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately, hundreds of men and women are wiling to risk their lives to bring other to safety.

If you were lost on a mountain, who would come to your rescue? Mother Nature can be harsh, especially if you're unprepared or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately, hundreds of men and women are wiling to risk their lives to bring other to safety. Nancy Green's new documentary film takes a behind-the-scenes look at Utah's first-responder Search and Rescue and Rescue volunteers, and shows how life and death experiences have shaped their lives. The film is title Search and Rescue. we

USU Marketing Professor Edwin Stafford and his family have been early adopters of various forms of green technology. They have solar panels and a ground sourced energy system, for example. The next step, they decided, was the purchase of a Tesla electric vehicle as the new family car. Professor Stafford recounts some of their experiences in his article “Bridging the Chasm: An Early Adopter’s Perspectives on how Electric Vehicles Can Go Mainstream,” to be published in June in Sustainability: The Journal of Record.

We have established an Access Utah tradition: On or near Earth Day each year we invite Utah writer Stephen Trimble and other guests to talk about the earth, the land, and the environment. Here is Trimble’s suggestion for this year: Why don’t we talk about young people’s responses to the land, especially young people who are writing about the land. We’ll talk about it with Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America;” naturalist, teacher, and activist, Jack Greene, and his students Josh Velazquez and Darrin Bingham and, from Capitol Reef NP, UVU Adjunct Instructor Kiri Manookin and some of her students.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.—43.8 million, or 18.5%—experiences mental illness in a given year.1 Approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S.—9.8 million, or 4.0%—experiences a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.2 Approximately 1 in 5 youth aged 13–18 (21.4%) experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life. For children aged 8–15, the estimate is 13%.3

Richard Bushman is professor of history emeritus at Columbia University and formerly the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He is author, among many other books, of a biography of Joseph Smith titled "Rough Stone Rolling." Professor Bushman came in to the UPR studios in March 2017 for conversation with Tom Williams following his appearance at a conference on the USU campus titled “New Perspectives on Joseph Smith and Translation.” The conference was sponsored by USU’s Religious Studies Program and the Faith Matters Foundation, a non-profit organization that encourages discussion about Mormon topics.

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, a professor of Christian ethics, is the author of the 2013 book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (Fortress Press). She gave a lecture yesterday at USU in the Tanner Talks series from the College of Humanites and Social Sciences. Dr. Moe-Lobeda joins us for Access Utah today, along with Rev. Scott Thalacker, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Logan.

In his book, “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” (now out in paperback), Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. Drawing on high-level access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Warrick weaves moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it. Black Flags reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.