Access Utah

Today's episode of Access Utah originally aired in October 2015.

William J. "Dub" Lawrence says "I was elected county sheriff of Davis County in 1974. On the 22nd of September, 2008, the very SWAT team that I founded in the 1970s killed my son-in-law, in my presence, as I defended them to his father, and his mother, and my children, promising them that these men were trained and professional and knew what they were doing."

In 2015 the number of visitors to Yellowstone exceeded four million for the first time. David Quammen, writing in the May 2016 edition of National Geographic magazine, asks "Can we hope to preserve, in the midst of modern America, any such remnant of our continent's primordial landscape, any such sample of true wildness-a gloriously inhospitable place, full of predators and prey, in which nature is still allowed to be red in tooth and claw? Can that sort of place be reconciled with human demands and human convenience? Time alone, and our choices, will tell. But if the answer is yes, the answer is Yellowstone."

Consider the $20 bill.

French Photographer Caroline Planque was on the USU campus recently to present portraits of, and interviews with, individuals affected by capital punishment in Texas. The Utah legislature recently considered (and did not pass) a bill that would have abolished the death penalty in the state. Planque first became interested in people who are impacted by capital punishment while attending college in Austin.

Charles Bock's daughter was 5 months old when his wife was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His wife died two and a half years later, just before their daughter's third birthday. Charles Bock has written a new novel that's based on that experience. It’s titled "Alice & Oliver."

The 2016 Utah Legislature passed SCR9 which describes pornography as a public health crisis. The resolution has captured attention of people around the world. There has been some push-back as well.

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In his new book "Making the White Man's West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West" (University Press of Colorado), Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space.

Jane Mayer, who joins us for the hour today, says that rather than what we might have thought of as a recent popular uprising against “big government” leading to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement, what has really happened is the creation of a network of very wealthy people (led by the Koch brothers) with extreme libertarian views who have bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.

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: “For our Earth Day program, how about addressing the future of recreation on crowded and imperiled public lands in Utah?