Terry Tempest Williams. La vitalidad de la lucha, la pasión de pensar y escribir

Terry Tempest Williams 
(photo by Ted C. Brummond) 

Terry Tempest Williams Biography
Naturalist, Writer, Environmental Activist
1955 –

"The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time." 

The Ecology Hall of Fame, adding Terry Tempest Williams to its honorees, noted that she “combines all the major strains of environmental passion.” Her life has focused on opposing resource destruction, especially that affecting human health; a love for the desert, and other naturally beautiful places; and land stewardship over many generations, which ties her to the region where she was born and still lives.

Williams is a Utah native, descended from five or six generations of Mormon pioneers. “I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture,” she says. “I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau.”

Williams is perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon, 1991), in which she chronicles the epic rise of Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to be caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 60s. Refuge is now regarded as a classic in American nature writing, a testament to loss and the earth's healing grace.

Williams’ other books include Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert, 2001, a collection of essays, An Unspoken Hunger (Pantheon, 1994); Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (Pantheon, 1995); Coyote's Canyon (Gibbs M. Smith, 1989); and Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984). She is also the author of two children's books: The Secret Language of Snow (Sierra Club/Pantheon, 1984); and Between Cattails (Little Brown, 1985).

In 2004 Terry Tempest Williams published The Open Space of Democracy, in which she tries to define how we can break down the partisanship and polarization in our society so that we can come together to solve the political and environmental problems which threaten our democracy and our land. In it she says, “I do not think we can look for leadership beyond ourselves. I do not think we can wait for someone or something to save us from our global predicaments and obligations. I need to look in the mirror and ask this of myself: If I am committed to seeing the direction of our country change, how must I change myself?”

In 2006, Ms. Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction.

Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah and Moose, Wyoming.

Biographical notes courtesy: Rob Shetterly, Terry Tempest Williams

(http://www.foreverwildfilm.com/ttwilliams.html)

Terry Tempest Williams  

Terry Tempest Williams grew up within sight of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A fifth-generation Mormon, her ancestors followed Brigham Young, "the American Moses," from Illinois to the Promised Land for spiritual sovereignty in 1847. 

"I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture. I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau; these ideas are then filtered through the prism of my culture, and my culture is Mormon. These tenets of family and community which I see at the heart of that culture are then articulated through story." Such story vibrates in her well-known book, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon, 1991), which explores the 1983 epic rise of Great Salt Lake and flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge concurrently with the events surrounding her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to be caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950's and 60's. This work is now regarded as a classic in American Nature Writing, a testament to loss and the earth's healing grace. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "There has never been a book like Refuge ...utterly original."

(http://www.oneworldjourneys.com/palmyra/expedition/exped_team.html)

 "Perhaps we project on to starlings that which we deplore in ourselves: our numbers, our aggression, our greed, and our cruelty. Like starlings, we are taking over the world." 

Refuge 

-Terry Tempest Williams

“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” 

-Terry Tempest Williams

Thunderstorm over St. Mark's Nat. Refuge, Daniel Ewert, Flickr.com)

"To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace." 

-Terry Tempest Williams

"The Clan of One-Breasted Women: Epilogue" by Terry Tempest Williams

The naturalist and writer Terry Tempest Williams offers notions of neighborliness, sacred rage, and beauty as a matter of survival. And she sheds light on the American West as a crucible of American divides and possibilities.

6 Months Since BP Oil Spill, Writer and Environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams Asks "Where Is Our Outrage?"

http://www.terrain.org/interview/17/
http://www.coyoteclan.com/index.html
us.org/pubs/mn/quietlysubversive.cfm
http://www.foreverwildfilm.com/ttwilliams.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/21/6_months_since_bp_oil_spill
http://www.thewitness.org/archive/april2001/williamsinterview.htmlhttp://www.aam-