Access Utah

For two days each year in August, county, municipal and state leaders and other stake holders gather in Cedar City for the Utah Rural Summit. They come from throughout Utah to explore issues that impact rural life, to hear from experts the latest information pertaining to rural life, and to discuss policies necessary to maintain and expand the political, cultural and economic relevance of rural communities. UPR's Southern Utah Correspondent Chris Holmes reports from the summit on its second day.

Thomas Jefferson called farmers “the chosen people of God” and claimed that they were inherently virtuous, the best citizens for the new republic. Evelyn Funda, author of “Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament,” says that “the American imagination has endowed farming with profound and enduring symbolic significance. ...no other occupation —with perhaps the exception of motherhood—so fully spans the imaginative range of human experience or is so profoundly invested with symbolic significance in our culture, even by those who have never worked or lived on a farm.” In Jefferson’s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957.

Has Alzheimer’s Disease has touched your family? There are 50,000 Utahns affected by Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Utah has the nation’s highest growth rate of AD (127%). There are more than 5 million cases of AD in the US today and by 2050, that number is expected to nearly triple to 13.8 million and care costs will reach over $1.2 trillion. There is no known cure and the impact on afflicted individuals and their families is devastating. The AD process may begin decades before diagnosis. But Maria Norton, USU Associate Professor of Family Consumer and Human Development, says that while there are some factors we are born with (e.g. genes) that can't be modified, there are a host of factors that have been shown to affect our risk for Alzheimer’s that ARE modifiable, and if we can encourage individuals, families and communities to adopt healthy lifestyle habits, we may be able to make a "course correction" to avoid or at least delay AD as individuals, and as a society.

Rich Cohen writes in National Geographic magazine's August cover story titled “Sugar Love (a not so sweet story)” that sugar was the oil of its day. The more you tasted, the more you wanted. In 1700 the average Englishman consumed 4 pounds a year. By 1900 he was up to 100 pounds a year. Today the average American consumes 77 pounds of added sugar annually, or more than 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day. As lands with oil and gas are greatly sought after today so it was with lands for sugarcane that needed tropical, rain-drenched fields to flourish. In school they call it the age of exploration, the search for territories and islands that would send Europeans all around the world. In reality, it was a hunt for fields where sugarcane would prosper.

Chip Ward writes in The Nation: “At this very moment, [TrekWest adventurer John] Davis is walking, biking, paddling and horseback riding 6,000 miles through a chain of mountain ranges that stretches like a spine across North America from the Sierra Madres of Mexico through the Rockies of the American West up into Canada. He started this winter in the Sonoran desert we share with our southern neighbor and has been heading northward for months. He will cross many of our most treasured national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, the ones that tourists love, but his trek is no sightseeing adventure. Davis and his Trek West partners along the route are advocating for what they call 'landscape connectivity' on a continental scale.”

Ophthalmologists Dr. Geoffrey Tabin (based in Salt Lake City) and Dr. Sanduk Ruit have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to blind people in some of the most isolated, impoverished reaches of developing countries in the Himalayas and Sub-Saharan Africa. Drs. Ruit and Tabin founded the Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) in 1995. Geoffrey Tabin was a high-achieving Harvard Medical School student from the suburbs of Chicago who was also an accomplished mountain climber; he was the fourth person to reach the famed Seven Summits, the tallest peak on each continent. It was through high-altitude climbing that he first came to witness the dramatic effects of cataract surgery on blind villagers. Dr. Tabin joins Tom Williams for the hour on Tuesday’s Access Utah.

Legendary lyricist Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, Fiorello!) is in Logan for events with the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theater. He is Tom Williams' guest for the hour on Access Utah. Monday 9:00 to 10:00 a.m.

Ceiridwen Terrill writes about how, at a particularly sad and frightening time in her life, a wolf dog was the kind of companion she was searching for. In her book, "Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs," she talks about an animal whose heart is divided between the woman she loves, and the desire to roam free. In the end, Terrill realizes she must confront the reality of taming a half-wild animal. We revisit a conversation from December 2012.

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn craftsman from New York whose impoverished and obscure life was electrified by the Mormon faith. He trudged around the U.S. and England to gain converts for Mormonism, spoke in spiritual tongues, married more than 50 women, and eventually transformed a barren desert into his vision of the Kingdom of God.

Animal welfare activists filed a lawsuit Monday, challenging Utah’s “Ag Gag” law. We'll revisit a debate from May when, in the first test in the nation of an “Ag Gag” law, a Utah woman was charged for using her cell phone to film a slaughterhouse. Charges against Amy Meyer were subsequently dropped. Under Utah’s law (H.B. 187) passed in 2012, it is illegal to film an agricultural operation while trespassing or entering the premises on false pretenses. What do you think? Do surreptitious whistle blowers at farms and slaughterhouses provide a needed service or are they public nuisances? Do you think Utah’s “Ag Gag” law is a necessary protection or an infringement on citizens’ rights?

What’s on your Utah bucket list? What adventure have you always wanted to do? What activities have you crossed off your Utah Bucket List and can suggest to us? We’d love to share your list with others. We’d also love to share your photos. You can share your list & photos on our Utah Public Radio Facebook page and call 1-800-826-1495 Monday 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. A film, “The Utah Bucket List,” premieres August 1 on KUED and is hosted by Salt Lake Tribune outdoor writer Brett Prettyman and produced by KUED’s Nancy Green. Prettyman has featured several of the adventures on the list in a series of articles in the Tribune.

According to a BBC report from July 16, “a new interim Egyptian government has been sworn in, with army chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the ousting of Mohammed Morsi, becoming deputy PM as well as defence minister. ... The swearing in followed another night of violence between security forces and Morsi supporters that left seven dead. A spokesman for Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood called the interim government ‘illegitimate’. Mr Morsi was ousted on 3 July in what many have said was a military coup.The army said it was fulfilling the demands of the people after mass anti-Morsi protests.”

Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman was recently acquitted of all charges in the death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. More than 150 people marched in protest of the verdict in Salt Lake City. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, some of the protesters said that the trial’s outcome will increase racial profiling and open the door for “trigger-happy” vigilantes. We’re going to open up Wednesday’s Access Utah to you to talk about this case.

Paul Bogard, author of the new book, “The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light,” spent his childhood summers in a cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota, where shooting stars cut across swaths of countless stars, the Milky Way reflected off the lake, and the woods were so dark he couldn’t see his hands in front of his face. In our modern world of nights as bright as day, most of us no longer experience true darkness. Eight out of ten Americans born today won’t ever live where they can see the Milky Way.

Pastor Don Mackenzie, Rabbi Ted Falcon and Imam Jamal Rahman -- known as the Interfaith Amigos --are co-authors of “Getting to the Heart of Interfaith:The Eye-Opening, Hope-Filled Friendship of a Pastor, a Rabbi & a Sheikh.” Known for their unique blend of spiritual wisdom and humor, they openly address the usual taboos of interfaith dialogue — the “awkward” parts of each tradition — in order to create a more authentic conversation -- a conversation about the real issues that make interfaith dialogue and cooperation difficult.

We continue a series of conversations with authors whose books are featured on our UPR Book List. Today: Kevin Fedarko talks about his new book, “The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon.” Here’s how the publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes the book: “In the spring of 1983, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam. Worried federal officials desperately scrambled to avoid a worst-case scenario: one of the most dramatic dam failures in history. In the midst of this crisis, a trio of river guides secretly launched a small, hand-built wooden boat, a dory named the Emerald Mile, into the Colorado just below the dam’s base and rocketed toward the dark chasm downstream, where the torrents of water released by the dam engineers had created a rock-walled maelstrom so powerful it shifted giant boulders and created bizarre hydraulic features never previously seen.

Award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney says “forgiveness is elusive, mysterious, primal...an idea and an ache that is rooted in existential concerns.” PBS describes her film Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate this way: It “provides an intimate look into the spontaneous outpouring of forgiveness: from the Amish families for the 2006 shooting of their children in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania; the struggle of '60s radicals to cope with the serious consequences of their violent acts of protest;

Physicist and climate change & sustainability educator, Dr. Robert Davies responded to Monday's Access Utah (about the new book: "What to Expect When No One's Expecting") by saying that the author, Jonathan Last, “was throwing out one piece of misinformation after another, contradicted by the data, utterly unchallenged." Robert Davies asked for rebuttal time, and we're happy to continue our discussion on population and the environment on Tuesday’s Access Utah. We received comments from Peter, and from Dell in Minneapolis which we'll share and discuss as well.

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. In his new book “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting” Weekly Standard senior writer Jonathan Last says it’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, he says, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies.

Today we begin a series of conversations with authors featured on our UPR Booklist. Julia Corbett's new book, "Seven Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West" (University of Utah Press) is the story of a naturalist-turned-professor (Corbett) who flees city life each summer with her pets and power tools to pursue her lifelong dream: building a cabin in the Wyoming woods. With little money and even less experience, she learns that creating a sanctuary on her mountain meadow requires ample doses of faith, patience, and luck. The task also involves a gradual and sometimes painful acquisition of flexibility and humility in the midst of great determination and naive enthusiasm.