Speaker Bio

Amy Irvine is a longtime public lands activist. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Colorado Book Award while the Los Angeles Times wrote that it "might very well be Desert Solitaire's literary heir." Her third book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, both challenges and pays tribute to Edward Abbey fifty years after Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness was published. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

Abstract

People's anxiety and distress about the social and ecological implications of climate change are undermining mental health and well-being, according to multiple studies. We cannot afford to distract, delude, or disengage nor can we work to build communal models of sustainability when our own lives are beyond resuscitation. Drawing from her experience as a western public lands advocate and the mother of a severely epileptic child, Amy Irvine will speak about the act of wonder: as radical antidote to apathy, as strong medicine for what ails humanity and, in turn, the natural world.