Access Utah

We hope you’ll join us for our newest UPR Original Series, called Utah Women 20/20, which will explore the unique challenges and opportunities facing women in Utah today. We’re going to explore Gender Parity, the #MeToo movement, Elections, and much more. We begin the series today on Access Utah. Our guest is Neylan McBaine, CEO of Better Days 2020. Better Days 2020 says that “Utah helped lead the nation in advocating for women’s rights. [And we believe] that by popularizing our history in creative and communal ways, we can challenge Utahns to live up to this great legacy of women's advocacy.”

Part elegy, part ode, part investigative science journalism, Jonathan Thompson’s new book “River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster” (Torrey House Press), tells the gripping story behind the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster that turned the Animas River in southwestern Colorado orange with sludge and toxic metals for more than 100 miles downstream, wreaking havoc on cities, farms, and the Navajo Nation along the way.

The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident―in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war―Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades. She interweaves a narrative about the crime with information collected in interviews, historical examination of the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, a critique of portrayals of Vietnam in American popular culture, and discussions of the psychological consequences of trauma. This work allows us to better understand transgenerational and cultural trauma and advances our still complicated struggle to comprehend the war.

Dr. Anne Spoerry treated hundreds of thousands of people across rural Kenya over the span of fifty years. A member of the renowned Flying Doctors Service, the French-born Spoerry learned how to fly a plane at the age of forty-five and earned herself the cherished nickname, "Mama Daktari"--"Mother Doctor"--from the people of Kenya. Yet few knew what drove her from post-World War II Europe to Africa. Now, in the first comprehensive account of her life, Dr. Spoerry's revered selflessness gives way to a past marked by rebellion, submission, and personal decisions that earned her another nickname--this one sinister--working as a "doctor" in a Nazi concentration camp.

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible.

We don’t know how. We don’t know when. But death comes for us all.

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.

In 2012, photographer Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and created Project 562, which reflects her commitment to visit, engage with and photograph all 562 plus Native American sovereign territories in the United States. With this project she has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, many in her RV (which she has nicknamed the “Big Girl”) but also by horseback through the Grand Canyon, by train, plane, and boat and on foot across all 50 states.

Earl Swift began writing for a living in his teens. In the years since, the Virginia-based journalist has penned seven books and hundreds of major features for newspapers and magazines, and has earned a reputation for fast-moving narrative and scrupulous reporting. His editors have nominated his work for the National Book Award, the National Magazine Award, and six times for a Pulitzer Prize.

“I began my writing career by exploring the tracks humans have left in nature. Now I’m mostly interested in the tracks nature leaves in us.” That’s author Gary Ferguson. He says that nature provides beauty, mystery and community, traits that each of us very much needs. He is the author of 25 books. We talked with Gary Ferguson a few months ago about his latest “Land on Fire.” Today we’ll talk with him about “The Carry Home” a haunting meditation on wilderness, conservation, and grief, written following the death of his wife in a canoeing accident. We’ll also talk about “Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild.” And we’ll talk about the Yellowstone wolves, which Gary Ferguson has written about in two books “Yellowstone Wolves: The First Year,” and “Decade of the Wolf.”

Gary Paul Nabhan is an Agricultural Ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the interaction of biodiversity and cultural diversity of the arid binational Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other--even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. From Egypt's pyramids to the Hubble telescope, from the world's tallest skyscraper to the sidewalk below it, from Chartres' stained-glass windows to your iPhone, sand shelters us, empowers us, engages us, and inspires us. It's the ingredient that makes possible our cities, our science, our lives--and our future.And, incredibly, we're running out of it.

The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from Colorado's headwaters, to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and rv parks, to the spot near the U.S.-Mexico border where the river runs dry.

"The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places," features William Atkins' travels across five continents over three years, visiting deserts both iconic and little-known to discover a realm as much internal as physical. His journey takes him to the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter and Australia’s nuclear-test grounds; the dry Aral Sea of Kazakhstan and ‘sand seas’ of China’s volatile north-west; the contested borderlands of Arizona and the riotous Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert; and the ancient monasteries of Egypt’s Eastern Desert. Along the way, Atkins illuminates the people, history, topography, and symbolism of these remarkable but often troubled places.

With roots steeped in Nashville’s songwriting tradition, TrouBeliever Fest founders Monty Powell and Anna Wilson say they had a deep desire to create a festival where the songs themselves would be the stars. The 1st Annual Troubeliever Festival is happening at Snowbasin on August 3 & 4 featuring Americana legends Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.

Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku says that moving human civilization to the stars, formerly the domain of fiction, is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility–and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources, or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, we must face the reality that humans will one day need to leave planet Earth to survive as a species.

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Imagine being a boy forced to attend school dressed in a girls’ uniform. Imagine being a girl banned from the girls’ bathroom and too afraid to “go” in a stall surrounded by boys. Imagine being asked, again and again, by other kids, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Imagine having your deepest sense of self refuted by adults in authority. Imagine the routine stress of being a transgender kid.

David Leonhardt writes recently in the New York Times that “In the suburbs of Salt Lake City, there is a planned community called Suncrest that has turned out to be a good place to study voter turnout. Suncrest feels like one community, full of modern, single-family houses. But it straddles two different counties — Salt Lake and Utah. And in 2016, the two used different voting systems.

Philosophy professor Hugh LaFollette says that he was raised in a gun culture. Later, he was struck by the very different policy responses to the killing of children in Dunblane, Scotland and Newtown, Connecticut. He says “my dis-ease at having no settled view of the topic nagged at me for several years before I decided that agnosticism on this topic was neither intellectually tenable nor morally responsible. I was impelled to examine the arguments and the evidence to reach a fair and informed view.” In his book “In Defense of Gun Control” (from Oxford University Press) LaFollette says that “the public debate about the private ownership of guns is contentious, often nasty, and rarely insightful” and grotesquely oversimplified. In the book he reviews the various philosophical perspectives on gun control; explains why Americans have a culture of guns not found elsewhere in the developed world; discusses armchair arguments on both sides; and examines empirical evidence relating to guns and gun control.