Join us on Thursday, April 13th for a talk by William deBuys, titled “Navigating the Rivers of Our Future: Preserving Hope and Commitment in a Challenging World.”
The talk will begin at 3.30pm in the Ford Lecture Hall of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum on the University of Oregon Campus, and will be followed by a reception.
William deBuys, the author of ten books, is a renowned environmental writer, environmental historian, and conservationist. He was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (co-authored with Alex Harris) and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, among other honors. He is also the author (with Joan Meyers) of Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, winner of three prizes for history and creative non-fiction, and was the founding chair (2001-2004) of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico.
His talk will be drawn from a trilogy of books about the past, present, and future of the planet: A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American West (2011, winner of the Weber-Clements Prize), The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures (listed by the Christian Science Monitor as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2015), and The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss (2021), which offers a surprising and revitalizing new way to think about Earthcare, one that may enable us to continue the difficult work that lies ahead. Bill McKibben as praised The Trail to Kankiroba as deBuys’ “masterwork—a story of an exploration, of Nepal, but also of the present and future of this planet.” Terry Tempest Williams called it a “walking prayer about beauty, hope, and longing in the service of human dignity and a living planet.”
