Access Utah

This is program originally broadcast on December 10, 2013.

We’re going to gather Utah writers to reflect on the environment for Earth Day 2014. Where are we with regard to the environment and the land we love? What progress has been made? What are the most pressing current problems?

In our increasingly polarized society, there are constant calls for compromise, for coming together. For many, these are empty talking points—for Lucy Moore, they are a life's work. As an environmental mediator, she has spent the past quarter century resolving conflicts that appeared utterly intractable.

Twenty years ago, beginning on April 6 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a horrific genocide that spanned 100 days. Genocide continues to be a tragic global issue. Paul Rusesabagina, whose autobiography “AN ORDINARY MAN,” inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda,” will join us from Brussels Belgium.

The $1,000 genome has long been considered a milestone—the price at which sequencing can finally go mainstream. Companies such as 23andMe provide inexpensive consumer tests that examine about half a million points of a person’s DNA sequence. But until now investigating all 3 billion base pairs that make up a human’s genome cost $10,000 or more.

“How about doing a story about the tar sands in Grand County & the Book Cliffs Highway? Seems like the state is thinking that Grand County is the new sacrifice zone for energy development.” That’s from UPR listener Kiley Miller.

In “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Mary Roach explores the much-maligned but vital tube from mouth to rear that turns food into the nutrients that keep us alive. She introduces us to scientists who tackle questions no one else thinks to ask.

Noted musicians/musicologists Hal Cannon and Gary Eller are searching eastern Idaho and northern Utah for songs written before the radio era (before 1923) about the early people, places and events of the region. Such songs provide unique glimpses of the early culture of the region.

On Thursday’s AU we’ll explore issues in higher education with Utah State University President Stan Albrecht. We’ll also be talking to Southern Utah University President Scott Wyatt.

On Wednesday’s AU we revisit a popular episode from a few months back: Generations of Ogdenites have grown up absorbing 25th Street’s legends of corruption, menace, and depravity. The rest of Utah has tended to judge Ogden—known in its first century as a “gambling hell” and tenderloin, and in recent years as a degraded skid row—by the street’s gaudy reputation. Present-day Ogden embraces the afterglow of 25th Street’s decadence and successfully promotes it to tourists.

Imagine, at five years old, you are sentenced to prison for 13 years. You have no access to your family or friends, to an education, to the outside world or to society. In some places, if a parent is sentenced to prison and they lack a guardian for their child, the child is imprisoned with the parent. Many of these children go to prison at a young age and are released to the world at age 18, with no life skills or support system, knowing nothing of the world but what they experienced in a jail cell.

A large body of social science research has found a number of correlations between religious belief and practice and a range of aspects of marriage and family life (e.g., marital happiness, stability, parent-child cohesion, positive youth outcomes). What is much less known are the processes at work in this area.

We’ll merge science and art on Thursday’s AU. The Bear River Watershed Council has organized a photo exhibit called “Radiant or Ravaged.”

Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, U.S. Presidents have the power to unilaterally create National Monuments. President Obama used this power in March to add 1,665 acres to the California Coastal National Monument.

Three BASE jumpers have been killed in the last two months in Utah. BASE jumping, (BASE stands for “Building, Antenna, Span, Earth,”) The sport grew out of skydiving (some skydivers feel that BASE jumping gives their sport a bad image.) BASE jumping has started to gain a more mainstream following in the last fifteen years.

We’ve been talking to various groups with a stake in the immigration debate and Monday on AU, Utah farmers will have their say.

It is Natural Resources Week at Utah State University and the theme is "Go Wild, It's All Around you." Nature writer Emma Marris was a featured speaker during this week's celebration and she joins us today on the program to talk about the latest wave in conservation and her new book, The Rambunctious Garden, that is changing and challenging our traditional views of conservation.

According to Reuters, a 29-page draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will warn that “Global warming will disrupt food supplies, slow world economic growth and may already be causing irreversible damage to nature” and “will also outline many ways to adapt to rising temperatures, more heatwaves, floods and rising seas.”

It’s time again to build a UPR reading list. We want to know what you’re reading, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, classic literature, young adult or children’s books.

Michelle Nijhuis writes in the April edition of National Geographic (“Can Coal Ever Be Clean?”) that “During the next two decades several hundred million people worldwide will get electricity for the first time, and if current trends continue, most will use power produced by coal...Coal, to use the economists’ euphemism, is fraught with “externalities”—the heavy costs it imposes on society.