Access Utah

“At All Costs” details the life of Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard L. Etchberger, a Pennsylvania native who was among 12 U.S. airmen killed March 11, 1968, when a North Vietnamese Army special forces team scaled a 3,000-foot cliff and attacked their secret radar camp.

Welcome to Access Utah. The new book "Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat" will make you think twice about eating bacon. Author Barry Estabrook investigates the pork industry from the big factory farms to the small heritage pig farms, where pigs are raised on pastures instead of slaughterhouses. He reveals the intelligence of pigs through stories about pigs using computers and he writes about their emotional side as well.

"Cars, for Americans, more than anything else represent freedom." So says Matt Hardigree, executive director of Jalopnik.com, who is featured in National Geographic Channel's new documentary film, "Driving America," which premieres on Memorial Day. The film examines how car culture has changed the way we live, work, travel and socialize; and looks into the future, including potential game changers like Tesla's electric cars.

Access Utah is presenting a periodic series of conversations on the hotly-debated topic of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs.) Our last such program, a few months ago, presented the case for GMOs. Wednesday on AU, public interest attorney Steven Druker will present a vigorous case against GMOs. Mr. Druker initiated a lawsuit that, according to him, forced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to divulge its files on genetically engineered foods.

How do you sum up a life? What do you include and what do you leave out? Heather Lende, author of the new book "Find the Good," is the obituary writer for the Chilkat Valley News in a beautiful but often dangerous spit of land in Alaska. She says "we are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live." Shanan Ballam, who teaches Creative Writing at Utah State University, wrote her brother Dylan's obituary. She felt that the obituary was not enough--it left too much unsaid. So she's been writing "addendum" poems, to "more fully characterize, celebrate, and mourn [her] brother."

In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream seems to have ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era.

The Coast Guard aviation community consists of approximately 800 pilots. They’re some of the best pilots in the world. Today Sheri Quinn talks to helicopter pilot Rick Hipes who served two decades in the Coast Guard, where he rescued people in the seas and mountains, and on the ground in cities. He also helped capture one of the world's most notorious drug traffickers.

In 1891, Lucien L. Nunn, working with Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse, Jr., pioneered the world’s first commercial production of high-tension alternating current (AC) for long-distance transmission—something Thomas Edison deemed dangerous and irresponsible. After creating the Telluride Power Company, Nunn constructed the state-of-the-art Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon and the Ontario Power Works at Niagara Falls. To support this new technology, he developed an imaginative model of industrial training that became so compelling that he ultimately abandoned his entrepreneurial career to devote his wealth and talents to experimenting with a new model of liberal education. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in eastern California. The school remains one of the most daring, progressive, and selective institutions of higher learning in America.

Joe Hill, labor icon and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, was executed by a Utah firing squad in November, 1915, after being convicted of two murders in a controversial trial. To commemorate the centenary of Hill's death, Folk musician and labor activist John McCutcheon is releasing a new album "Joe Hill's Last Will" which grew out of a one-man play of the same name written by activist and musician Si Kahn.

In a time of excess for many, some are living with less. A lot less! Tiny living has become increasingly popular in the past few years and today on Access Utah we'll talk about this thirst for simplicity, how it's changing the lives of those who live this way, how it's affecting the environment around them, and if Tiny Houses could be in the future for more of us. Our guests include Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller, Co-Directors of TINY, a documentary on Tiny living; Jeffrey White of the Sarah House Project and MicroHouse Utah; and Macy Miller, who lives in a tiny space of her own in Boise, Idaho.