Sandra Steingraber

Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized authority on the environment links to cancer and human health.

Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. Originally published in 1997, it was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries and won praise from international media including The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet, and The London Times.  More recently, Steingraber has published Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood  (2003) and Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (2011).

Photo: JT Thomas

Craig Childs

Craig Childs is a writer who focuses on natural sciences, archaeology, and remarkable journeys into the wilderness. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books on nature, science, and adventure. He is a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside, Orion, and High Country News. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to US border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet and Patagonia. 

Daniel McCool, (Ph.D., University of Arizona, 1983)

Professor of Political Science

Director, Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program

Co-director, University of Utah Sustainability Curriculum Development

Professor McCool’s research focuses on water resource development, public lands policy, voting rights, and Indian water rights.  He is the author of:

River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers (2012);Native Waters: Contemporary Indian Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era (2002) and Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water (1987/1994). He co-authored: Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and Indian Voting(2007); Staking Out the Terrain: Power and Performance Among Natural Resource Agencies (1996, 2d ed); and Public Policy Theories, Models and Concepts (1995).  He edited two books with his students:  Waters of Zion: The Politics of Water in Utah (1995) and Contested Landscape: The Politics of Wilderness in Utah and the West (1999).  His latest edited book is The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (2012). 

 He has served as a consultant for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U. S. Department of Justice, The ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, and the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy. 

 Title: "A New Water Ethic."  He’ll review current water policy and explain how it has led to unsustainable water consumption, and describe a new water ethic that changes how we relate to both nature and each other in regard to water.

Sculptor Andy Dufford will discuss his new work of public art on the Ogden River Parkway.

Artist’s statement:

The creation of artful spaces is my life's passion.

As a young man, I apprenticed with a painter and completed undergraduate work in design and community development. Traveling through Europe after university was a revelation. Walking through cities built with the skill of artists and artisans expanded my imagination and creating beautiful places became my primary focus. That journey was the beginning of a much longer exploration that continues today.

Over the last 16 years I have developed a value system that guides our work. These core values are community, creativity, timelessness, and craft.

Photo by: Rosalie Winard

Photographer Rosalie Winard will talk about her ongoing relationship with waterfowl as well as have an exhibit of her photographs on campus.

For over a decade, photographer Rosalie Winard has traveled the country by foot, canoe, airboat, and ATV, taking pictures of large birds of the wetlands from Florida to California, Louisiana to North Dakota. Her intimate portraits--tethered to an ethereal palette of white, gray, and black--are alight with Winard's passion for the avian world and its endangered terrain. Alternately meditative and exhilerating, abstract and literal, they capture the birds' remarkable habits and prehistoric forms, as well as their ineffable elegance and humor.

Rosalie Winard photographs birds as one might a family member caught in an intimate moment, and her avian portraits have been praised as both meditative and exhilarating. She is an award-winning photojournalist and artist  recently relocated to Salt Lake City from New York City. Her work on avian life has been published in an award winning book and exhibition WILD BIRDS OF THE AMERICAN WETLANDS, recently shown at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Her photographs have been published in Audubon, ArtForum, OnEarth, Time, The New York Times, Le Monde, Forbes, US News and World Report and have been shown on 60 Minutes, NBC, PBS & BBC. She has been featured on Radio West and other NPR affiliates and has lectured at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, University of Utah, Weber State University,  Mount Holyoke College, the Mono Basin Bird Chatauqua, the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, the Morro Bay Bird Festival and in SLC public schools. Winard's work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum of Utah, The New York Historical Society, Nelson Mandela, Temple Grandin, Oliver Sacks, Errol Morris and others. Her stunning avian photography, seeks to promote awareness and conservation of large wetland birds and their habitats in North America.