Access Utah

It’s a special Member Drive edition of the program again today. And today we’ll shine a spotlight on the Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection (CRIC), an organization in northern Utah devoted to helping refugees. We’ll review the history of refugees in northern Utah as well as current needs and we’ll talk about doing good in challenging times.

Once again it's a Member Drive edition of the program. Our special guest for the hour is Craig Jessop, Music Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra.

It’s a member drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite recent episodes of the program.

Dixie State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences is bringing the “Remember the 43 Students” art installation to their campus. This installation commemorates the six people who were killed and the 43 students who were “disappeared” in a night of unspeakable political violence in Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico on September 26, 2014.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants.

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’”

The Man Who Caught the Storm is the saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring, and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon.

Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity: it's what children feel at summer camp. But in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back.

Daniel James Brown’s bestseller The Boys in the Boat is a story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.

Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. We’ve lost 50% of the world’s coral in the last 30 years. Scientists say that climate change is now their greatest threat and it is estimated that only 10% can survive past 2050. In a new documentary film, “Chasing Coral,” a team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why coral are vanishing and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.

The U.S. Department of Education launches an investigation into Utah's ban on school mask mandates. Health officials hope personal stories — like that of a Vernal woman who got COVID after declining a vaccine — will help change minds. Gov. Spencer Cox questions the effectiveness of masks, contradicting healthcare professionals. And what the data from a European soccer championship can tell us about the spread of coronavirus at sports events in the US.

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat.

Douglas Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. “Nature’s Best Hope” shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Talllamy says that because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy.

An alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducts a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses. The horses and prisoners both arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many— the horses often abandoned and suspicious, the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addiction, emotionally, physically, and financially shattered. Ginger Gaffney’s job is to retrain the untrainable. With time, the horses and residents form a profound bond, and teach each other patience, control, and trust.

Today we feature a conversation with renowned actor and author George Takei. He is coming to Utah for the Moab Music Festival, which has commissioned a new work based on his speeches, personal writings, and recollections of his and his family’s internment in camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in Sri Lanka.” But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you?

Today we present a live episode of the Debunked Podcast. Host Tom Williams and Debunked Podcast host Don Lyons welcome Mary Jo McMillen, Executive Director of USARA (Utah Support Advocates for Recovery Awareness) and Ashanti Moritz, Outreach Director for the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes' Warrior Spirit Recovery Center to debunk the myth “indigenous and non-indigenous groups can't work together to solve social problems.”

We’re going to talk about housing in Utah today. Here are some headlines from the past several months: How tight is Utah’s housing market? Some buyers offer $100K over asking; ‘Hyper-, hyper-competitive’ Salt Lake area housing market is white hot, but are Californians to blame?; What’s driving Utah’s housing crisis? It’s not what you think, says economist; Housing affordability in Utah entering ‘perilous territory,’ study says; The pandemic has supercharged Utah’s housing market.

A while back on Access Utah, Michael Sowder, USU professor of English and affiliated professor of religious studies, helped us learn some of the history and current practice of yoga. On Tuesday’s Access Utah he’ll lead us in an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which may be of special interest during these times of pandemic.

Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Jevin West is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington. He directs the Center for an Informed Public, whose mission is to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse. He is co-author with Carl Bergstrom of “Calling Bullshit,” a book on how to spot and refute misinformation.