Access Utah

Rita Moreno is one of few people to hold the awards "Grand Slam" -- Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony. In her twenties, after her Oscar win for "West Side Story," she didn't work in Hollywood again for seven years, because she refused stereotyped roles. She's see as a trailblazer. And she's having, at 83, a well-deserved very good year.

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.

Writer David Quammen's working life bounces back and forth between topics such as grizzly bear conservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, close to home, and the study of lethal viruses that emerge from bats and chimpanzees and rodents in places like the Congo. Quammen will present on Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world, at this year's Shift Festival in Jackson Wyoming. He joins us on Access Utah today.

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.

“Is suicide wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Sometimes morally permissible? Imprudent, but not wrong? Is it sick, a matter of mental illness? Is it a private matter or a largely social one? Could it sometimes be right, or a "noble duty," or even a fundamental human right? Whether it is called "suicide" or not, what role may a person play in the end of his or her own life?” These are questions posed and addressed in a new book published by Oxford University Press with the full digital version hosted online by the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The book’s editor is Margaret Pabst Battin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Medical Ethics at the University of Utah. Her comprehensive historical sourcebook, “The Ethics of Suicide: HIstorical Sources,” will be presented at an event on Monday, October 5th - 12:00 - 2:00 pm at the J. Willard Marriot Library, Gould Auditorium, level 1.

The 21st Annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture will take place in the Logan Tabernacle, 50 N. Main Street, on Thursday, September 24, at 7 p.m. The title is "Narrating Jane: Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman." Jane Elizabeth Manning James was among the early African American converts to Mormonism. After joining the church in the early 1840s, James remained a faithful member until her death in Salt Lake City in 1908. Although she was well-known among church members during her lifetime, James was largely forgotten after her death. The lecture will be presented by Quincy D. Newell, a specialist in the religious history of the American West. After more than a decade on the Religious Studies faculty at the University of Wyoming, she now teaches in the Religious Studies department at Hamilton College. Newell is currently writing a biography of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

This is an encore presentation of "Access Utah."

Born in 1861 in New Mexico’s Acoma Pueblo, Edward Proctor Hunt lived a tribal life almost unchanged for centuries. But after attending government schools he broke with his people’s ancient codes to become a shopkeeper and controversial broker between Indian and white worlds. As a Wild West Show Indian he travelled in Europe with his family, and saw his sons become silversmiths, painters, and consultants on Indian Lore. In 1928, in a life-culminating experience, he recited his version of the origin myth of Acoma Pueblo to Smithsonian Institution scholars.

“In New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, 106 Mexican gray wolves may be some of the most monitored wildlife on the planet. Collared, microchipped, and transported by helicopter ... once a symbol of the wild, these wolves have come to illustrate the demise of wilderness in this Human Age. ... And yet, the howl of an unregistered wolf—half of a rogue pair—splits the night. If you know where to look, you'll find that much remains untamed, and even today, wildness can remain a touchstone for our relationship with the rest of nature.” That’s journalist and adventurer Jason Mark writing in his new book “Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.” He says that wildness is wily as a coyote: you have to be willing to track it to understand the least thing about it. Today on the program Jason Mark joins us for the hour.

The Cache Clean Air Consortium, in co-sponsorship with Breathe Utah, is a workshop that facilitates community partnerships that result in actionable strategies to improve air quality in the Cache Valley region of northern Utah.

Hyperpartisanship is as old as American democracy. But now, acrimony is not confined to a moment; it’s a permanent state of affairs and has seeped into every part of the political process. So say political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. When their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism” was published a few years ago, it stirred up considerable controversy and altered the debate about why America’s government has become so dysfunctional. Now, at the end of the Summer of Trump, we’ll check back in with Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. We’ll talk about political extremism and polarization, another possible government shutdown, Utah’s caucus and convention system, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Arizona’s redistricting commission, Australia’s carrot and stick approach to increasing voter turnout, and much more.

Parenting techniques continue to fuel online debate: do we protect our children? Prepare them? Research suggests our communities are increasingly safer than ever before, but the average citizen assumes otherwise - how do we navigate ourselves through these colliding perspectives and realities? Furthermore, how can we both protect and prepare our children, and do we need a self-identifying label to declare our techniques as parents? Tuesday on Access Utah we invite author Julie Lythcott Haims ("How to Raise an Adult") and Lenore Skenazy ("Free Range Kids") to discuss our options and to review varying perspectives on how to parent present-day.

Today's broadcast of "Access Utah" originally aired in 2011.

Dixie State University and the DOCUTAH International Documentary Film Festival offers three screenings of "Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot," the true story of the forgotten heroes in the fight for voting rights — the courageous students and teachers of Selma, Alabama, who stood up against injustice despite facing intimidation, arrests and violence. 2015 is the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act which was a direct product of this movement. By organizing and marching bravely, these "ordinary heroes" achieved one of the most significant victories of the civil rights era. The film is narrated by Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer and includes music from Mavis Staples, Ry Cooder, The Roots and Blind Boys of Alabama. It has been submitted for consideration for an Academy Award. Today on the program we speak with the director and producer of the film, Bill Brummel.

It’s been several months since we got together as a community and compiled a UPR book list. Public radio listeners are famous as avid readers. We want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or on your device right now? Fellow listeners may not know about it and may love it.

Today's Broadcast of "Access Utah" is an encore presentation from 2012.

Today's broadcast of "Access Utah" is an encore presentation from April 2015.

“My whole childhood, I never had a bed.” That’s how Elva Trevino Hart opens her memoir “Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child.”

In his new book “Ways to the West” (Utah State University Press) Tim Sullivan embarks on a car-less road trip through the Intermountain West, exploring how the region is taking on what may be its greatest challenge: sustainable transportation. Combining personal travel narrative, historical research, and his professional expertise in urban planning, Sullivan takes a critical yet optimistic and often humorous look at how contemporary Western cities are making themselves more hospitable to a life less centered on the personal vehicle.

“In our region fire is to dry forests as rain is to rainforests; both are important in the life of a forest to provide clean water, climate stabilization, hunting and fishing, outdoor recreation and wildlife habitat. A fire does not destroy a forest; rather, it simply resets nature’s clock as it has been doing for millennia,” said Chad Hanson, Director and Ecologist with the John Muir Project, Earth Island Institute, and co-editor of “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix”