Access Utah

The red rock canyon country of southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona is one of the most isolated, wild, and beautiful regions of North America. Europeans and Americans over time have mostly avoided, disdained, or ignored it. Wrecks of Human Ambition illustrates how this landscape undercut notions and expectations of good, productive land held by the first explorers, settlers, and travelers who visited it. Even today, its aridity and sandy soils prevent widespread agricultural exploitation, and its cliffs, canyons, and rivers thwart quick travel in and through the landscape.

Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.

For more than a century, oil has been the engine of growth for a society that delivers an unprecedented standard of living to many. We now take for granted that economic growth is good, necessary, and even inevitable, but also feel a sense of unease about the simultaneous growth of complexity in the processes and institutions that generate and manage that growth.

For years, Todd Snider has been one of the most beloved country-folk singers in the United States, compared to Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, John Prine, and dozens of others. He's become not only a new-century Dylan but a modern-day Will Rogers, an everyman whose intelligence, self-deprecation, experience, and sense of humor make him a uniquely American character.

The Mormon village was originally conceived as a place removed from the rest of the world, a place where the Saints could live strong faith-based identity. Although common in Europe, the pattern that Mormons used of residential villages with outlying farms was unusual in the American West. The first studies of these villages were by travelers who lived among the Mormons and wrote about their experiences. By linking these early accounts to the move of more formal academic studies of the twentieth century, “Saints Observed” provides the most complete look at Mormon community life.

Josh Hanagarne couldn't be invisible if he tried. Although he wouldn't officially be diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome until his freshman year of high school, Josh was six years old and onstage in a school Thanksgiving play when he first began exhibiting symptoms.

This program originally aired in July of 2013.

We want to hear about your dog, cat, rabbit, armadillo, or any other animal you love. Post a picture, comment or question on our page for Dr. James Israelsen, with Mountain View Veterinary Health Center.

Seven moves in seven years as a pre-teen cursed Kirk Millson with a pathologically low tolerance for routine. After terrorizing his wife, Alison, with several near-death wilderness experiences, he toughened up his young children on a steady diet of desert excursions until their luck changed and his career intervened.

On Thursday’s AU we revisit our conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin:

If the trends of population growth and richer diets continue, experts say that by 2050 we will need to double the amount of crops we grow. Jonathan Foley, author of “Food: Feeding Nine Billion” in the May edition of National Geographic is director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

Go back a few generations and odds are that your family lived and worked on a farm. We’re going to go back to our roots with USU professors Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne McNeill, authors of “Farm: A Multi-Modal Reader,” which explores what farms, farming, and farmers mean to us as a culture.

Today's Access Utah is a rebroadcast of a program that originally aired April 29, 2013.

Friday on Access Utah we’ll hear from some of the 16 Moab students who showed up recently for the town’s first “Rock Camp.” Then from the UPR series “My Address Is…” we’ll meet Don Baldwin, who grew up in Salt Lake City but decided as a young man that he wanted to be a dairy farmer; and the Landau family, who live in the city and bike to work and hike from home.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a high plateau in a mountainous region where there were gold-digging ants. This launched the myth of Tibet as a place of beauty, riches and peace. University of Cambridge Professors, Lezlee Brown Halper and Stefan Halper, were invited to visit Tibet in 1997 as guests of the Chinese government.

This is program originally broadcast on December 10, 2013.

We’re going to gather Utah writers to reflect on the environment for Earth Day 2014. Where are we with regard to the environment and the land we love? What progress has been made? What are the most pressing current problems?

In our increasingly polarized society, there are constant calls for compromise, for coming together. For many, these are empty talking points—for Lucy Moore, they are a life's work. As an environmental mediator, she has spent the past quarter century resolving conflicts that appeared utterly intractable.

Twenty years ago, beginning on April 6 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a horrific genocide that spanned 100 days. Genocide continues to be a tragic global issue. Paul Rusesabagina, whose autobiography “AN ORDINARY MAN,” inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda,” will join us from Brussels Belgium.

The $1,000 genome has long been considered a milestone—the price at which sequencing can finally go mainstream. Companies such as 23andMe provide inexpensive consumer tests that examine about half a million points of a person’s DNA sequence. But until now investigating all 3 billion base pairs that make up a human’s genome cost $10,000 or more.