Here we stare down our present situation without flinching but with radical hope as Williams reminds us that love and beauty is felt in chaos and heartbreak. Healing is going beyond anger; It’s a process of eroding and evolving at once. We must let go of our certainty to come back into a place of communion and communication with each other and with the earth. 

Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist, environmentalist, and award-winning author. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. She currently is the writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah. She is the author of many books including: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon 1991), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Vintage Books 1995), Leap (Vintage 2001), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), The Open Space of Democracy (The Orion Society 2004), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon 2008), When Women Were Birds (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012), The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016), Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019)

Interview Date: 12/13/2019  Tags: Terry Tempest Williams, erosion, Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, coal production, fossil fuel industry, Diné Bikéyah, democracy, climate change, Grand Canyon, Weather Reports, Kit Jennings, Powder River Basin, Willie Grayeyes, Frontier Mormons, Tim DeChristopher, oil and gas leases, oil & gas leases, oil & gas leasing, oil and gas leasing, Dan Dixon Tempest, Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights, Blake’s Tiger, tiger burning bright, Jonah Yellowman, Yeibichi dances, Castleton Tower Utah, anger, love, grief, Earth, certainty, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Meditation, Spirituality, Social Change/Politics, Personal Transformation, Peace/Nonviolence, Community