Author offers conservation by the book

Author: Andrew Throdahl

Terry Tempest Williams delivered a lecture in conjunction with the Energy Symposium to a packed Mead Chapel, filled with the usual mix of faculty, students and townspeople. Terry Tempest Williams's personality subscribes to that rugged but maternal personality well known in Vermont. Her environmental writings blend the personal and the political, as if the purely political was not hospitable enough for her character. Her Friday evening lecure addressed out society's destruction of nature.

Williams spoke about the photographer and writer Robert Adams, whose work is currently on display at the College's Museum of Art in the exhibit Robert Adams: Turning Back, a Photographic Journal of Re-exploration. Known for his objective approach to nature, Adams' work addresses the clear-cutting, or clear-felling, of forestry in the American west.

"Terry Tempest Williams strikes me as a product of the American West," said Olivia Bailey '07, "so it was appropriate for her to discuss Adams."

The talk, entitled Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was split into three sections, like a three-act play, each interspersed with quotes from Adams' writings. She exposed the problems in the first section, developed them in the second and found resolution, or rather brought hope, in the third.

In the first "act," Williams described a dream in which a mountain she lived near was shaved of vegetation. She declared that our destruction of nature is suicide. Adding her personal touch, she described the members of her family acknowledging the global suicide.

The second section was the most dramatic and confusing, featuring an extended description of a recent massacre of American prairie dogs, gassed because of complications involving golf courses, farmers and developers, despite their endangered species status. And the third section ended optimistically, conveying "the birth of a new idea." Williams's maternal persona emerged while expressing the labor society endures to produce new ideas.

Throughout these various sections Williams conveyed her disgust at the government's insensitivity toward nature, especially its pursuit of "economic gain at the expense of ecological wealth."

"How is destruction renewal?" asked Williams.

In a coda, she recited two "dreams," one by Robert Adams and the other by E.B. White. White's stood out for its concept of flowers being "wild flags," suggesting her hinted union of government and nature. Williams made the students stand, bidding them to pursue her transcendentalist ideals in order to preserve the environment.

Her potent images were clearly meant to be read, since at times her speech became confusing, particularly in the "developmental" prairie-dog "act." Her sensitivity, which twice resulted in tears, kept the audience captivated, although it made some uncomfortable. One first year said, "It is nice to hear someone so passionate about their subject, but the crying was a little much."

An encounter with the artist can taint one's outlook on his or her art. So it is critical to separate Williams' personality from Williams' writing. Once this is achieved, her work becomes compelling, her mystical view of nature exposes the disturbing gravitas of the climate problem. If not, the gonzo and irenic culture to which she works so hard to conform becomes an affectation, magnifying her flaws.