Thu, Dec 16
|Zoom
Brooke Williams, Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks and a Rant
Brooke Williams walked twice into Southern Utah’s Mary Jane Wilderness: at the beginning of the Trump presidency, which will be seen as among the most tumultuous and destructive in American History, and four-years later at its end. Brooke will be in conversation with Christy Williams Dunton.
Date, Time & Location
Dec 16, 2021, 6:00 PM MST
Zoom
About the Event
This event will take place on Zoom, please register here.
Order Mary Jane Wild online here
In Mary Jane Wild Brooke documents his experience in this magical place, his sense of what happened during the Trump dynasty, why, and its possible long-term effects. It is also his story of how walking in the wilderness heals, helps him identify, then adapt to changing modern conditions, and understand the role wildness continues to play in the evolution of life.
"Of all the reactions to the ugly shock of Trump's election in 2016, Brooke Williams' may be the best: his walk into the ancient order of the desert wild, and into the modern craziness of the American mind, is at turns hilarious, wrenching, and full of the kind of intense engagement that we need in order to endure (and even surmount) our present trials." -Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
"We go out to go inward, go to the wild to find our own wildness, and so Brooke Williams did when Trump was elected, to both escape and confront his demons and ours, his dreams and our possibilities. This is a book that invites the reader to wander with the author, through cloudy thoughts and solid red sandstone landscapes, to meet pack rats, ravens, hermits, bears ears, analyze the difference between stoke and awe, ponder the evolution of the species, masculinity toxic and otherwise, weave in and out of the dreamtime and the political scene. T.S. Eliot famously said, 'And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,” and this book of venturing forth and coming home is all about that.'" -Rebecca Solnit
About the Author
Brooke Williams has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as the Executive Director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a Biology degree from the University of Utah. He’s written four books including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles. He is involved in The Great West Institute, a think tank exploring expansion and innovation in the conservation movement and is currently working on a book about ground-truthing.
About Christy Williams Dunton
Christy's led a colorful, contemplative life as a multidisciplinary artist and community builder on the Colorado Plateau . Public Radio Producer, co-founder of KZMU fm, Oral Historian, Hospice Chaplain, Somatic Counselor, Celebrant; she is driven by questions of Soul and of Science, and of Person in healthy relation to Place. She lives with her sculptor husband and their dog in Castle Valley, Utah, where they co-produce Moab ArTTrails, a non-profit, public sculpture program in Moab. She studied Liberal Arts, Mass Communications at Utah State University and CU Boulder, and is a certified practitioner of Somatic Archeology from The Black Hills Historic Trauma Research and Recovery Center.