Terry Tempest Williams remembers the exact moment she became an environmentalist: the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. She was visiting here with her family at the time. “I’ll never forget it,” she said of the oiled birds and tarry beaches, and she remembers the dismayed look on her grandmother’s face. “As a child, what translated is you could never take this for granted.”
Williams, the acclaimed author who has been called a “citizen writer” for her works on environmental justice, will discuss her recently released book, The Hour of Land, at UCSB’s Campbell Hall in a talk sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Published in honor of the centennial of the National Park Service (NPS), her book is “a collection of stories rooted in each” of the 12 parks covered in the book, from Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic to Gettysburg in Virginia.
Inside, she challenges Wallace Stegner’s idea that the parks are America’s best idea, writing rather they’re “an evolving idea.” “It’s a great way to open and broaden the discussion of what our national parks are.”