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Environmentalist authors discuss nature, love and living green at SLPL for Utah Humanities Book Festival

By Katherine Rogers

For the 21st year, Utah Humanities hosts their Book Festival: This state-wide, six-week event is a chance for people to explore new books and hear from the authors. This year the festival is just as busy as always, including a reading by authors Nicole Walker and Julia Corbett, two authors dedicated to the environment, and our very human relationship with it.

On October 3, at 7 P.M. these two authors will be at the Salt Lake City Public Library. Walker and Corbett will read from and discuss their newest books, Sustainability: A Love Story and Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday, respectively.

Nicole Walker is an associate professor at Northern Arizona University and a nonfiction editor of the online literary journal, the Diagram. She has published several other books including Quench Your Thirst with Salt and Where the Tiny Things Are. She has also been recognized as a notable essayist in Best American four separate times.

In Sustainability, Walker uses humor to reflect on the struggle to keep green in everyday life. After all, how easy is it to be environmentally friendly when electric cars are expensive, hamburgers are tempting, and plastic is unavoidable? Walker also looks at sustainability in personal relationships.

A professor at the University of Utah in the Communications Department and the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, Julia Corbett wrote one of the first environmental journalism texts, Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages. She has also written other texts including Seven Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West.

In Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday, Corbett uses short stories and essays to remind us of the nature that we take for granted. Using personal experience and research, she looks at how a mall is a like a trout river and what is despicable about a storeowner who keeps his doors open all the time.

Both books are for environmentalists, whether devout, lazy or brand new. However, all are welcome to this free event. Head down to the Main Library to be reminded that you are not alone in your struggle to be an environmentalist at all times, and that nature is there to be appreciated everywhere you look.

 

Katherine Rogers is a junior at the University of Utah majoring in Communications. She is an intern at CATALYST Magazine.

This article was originally published on October 2, 2018.