A free talk Thursday, Sept. 10, in Commencement Hall, by the inspirational writer and national speaker
TACOMA, Wash. – Gary Ferguson, the best-selling nature book author whose views on topics ranging from climate change to the palliative power of nature are aired regularly on radio and television, will give a free public talk the University of Puget Sound.
His lecture, titled “Promise of the Wild,” will be held at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 10, in the Tahoma Room of Commencement Hall, at the University of Puget Sound. Admission is complimentary, and a map of the campus is below.
Ferguson is the author of 22 books on nature and science, including Shouting at the Sky (2009), a portrait of troubled teens seeking hope among Utah's inspiring canyons. His most recent book, The Carry Home (2014), celebrates the outdoor life he shared with his wife before she died in a Canadian canoeing accident and took his fellow baby boomers to task for abandoning their 1960s advocacy for the environment. The Carry Home won the 2015 Nature Writing Award from the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. It was one of many prestigious awards garnered by Ferguson.
The respected writer, researcher, speaker, and teacher has appeared on more than 200 television and radio shows, including sharing his nature-oriented commentaries on National Public Radio. He has spent more than 20 years traveling the trails, backroads, and rivers of North America, observing the life around him and the sometimes fraught, sometimes cathartic, kinship between humans and the wilderness.
After trekking 500 miles through Yellowstone National Park, Ferguson wrote Walking Down the Wild in 1997. Earlier, he followed the first 14 wolves released into the park over several seasons and wrote The Yellowstone Wolves: The First Year (1996). For the book Shouting at the Sky, Ferguson spent time with a dozen youths suffering from drug and emotional problems as they traveled with a wilderness therapy program and sought to reinvent their lives.
The natural world for Ferguson is more than a place of wonder. He told the Billings Gazette ina 2014 interview that the wilderness is an important place for “people to calm their furious minds.” The works of nature, he said, are “canvasses for the imagination that provide an essential quality for moving through [troubling] experiences.”
Ferguson’s writing, including essays for publications such as Vanity Fair, Outside, and The Los Angeles Times, has changed with the passing years, he comments on his website Wildwoods.
“I began my writing career by exploring the tracks humans have left in nature,” he says. “Now, I’m mostly interested in the tracks nature leaves in us.”
Ferguson has served as a Seigle Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis and as a William Kittredge Distinguished Writer at the University of Montana. He also has taught in a graduate writing program at the University of Idaho and for the Rainier Writing Workshop in the Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University.
In addition to presenting the public lecture, Ferguson and his partner, Mary Clare, a cultural psychologist, will work with Puget Sound students in the Environmental Policy and Decision Making program. They also will join a class camping trip to Mount Rainier to discuss student essays on science, values, and the ideas of “nature” and “wilderness.”
Mary Clare is a professor and director of the Psychological and Cultural Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. Her research focuses on psychology applications in schools and communities, with an emphasis on addressing systems of oppression. She is the author of the book 100 Voices: American Talk about Change, in which citizens from a range of backgrounds talk about what change means to them, while the author creates a dialogue across their differences. Clare also facilitates workshops on topics including mental illness, social justice, and diversity.
For directions and a map of the University of Puget Sound campus:pugetsound.edu/directions
For accessibility information, please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.
Press photos of Gary Ferguson can be downloaded from pugetsound.edu/pressphotos.
Photos on page: Top right, Gary Ferguson; Above right: Photo from cover of Shouting at the Sky; Above left: Book cover The Carry Home.
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