2018 Wallace Stegner Lecture Series To Begin

PALO ALTO, CA – The Peninsula Open Space Trust's Wallace Stegner Lecture Series will begin soon for 2018, with such top speakers as best-selling author and humorist Bill Bryson, former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy and environmental activist Winona LaDuke.

"POST will bring their unique perspectives and life experiences together around the 2018 series theme 'Modern Voices of Conservation,'" said the activist organization that protect open space in and around the Silicon Valley. "Each will speaker will share how the natural world has inspired their work. They will not only entertain, but also highlight some of the hottest topics in the national discourse related to POST’s work."

POST provided the following details on the speakers:

Bill Bryson will kick off the series on Jan. 30, and the event is sold out.

Bryson is an American-born author and UK resident most famous for his travel books A Walk in the Woods, about his experience hiking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, and Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe. In addition to his amazing writing career, he has a keen ability communicate scientific topics. As a longtime resident of the UK, Bryson has been an advocate for conserving the English countryside. In 2007, he was appointed president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Bryson will share his unique perspectives regarding conservation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gina McCarthy will speak on Feb. 13.

McCarthy is the former administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and one of the leading national experts on environment and public health impacts of climate change. She has been advocating for strategies to protect the environment and public health for over thirty years.

During her years as administrator under President Obama, she led major progress in the public health and environmental protection goals, including signing the Clean Power Plan, first-ever national standards to reduce carbon emissions, and signing the Paris Climate Agreement. Currently, she teaches a course at Harvard University titled “Environmental Leadership: Integrating Science, Public Policy, and Political Rhetoric.”

Winona LaDuke will close the series out on March 20.

LaDuke is a Native American environmentalist and the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native American environmental advocacy organization. Honor the Earth held several events to support Standing Rock and are currently active in the Dakota Pipeline protests. She is known for her work on Native American tribal land claims and preservation and sustainable development.

She founded WELRP, the White Earth Land Recovery Project, to help recover the ancestral lands of Native Americans by the U.S. government. She has gathered many native environmentalist groups together to push for environmental regulations, strengthening renewable energy and food systems in the tribal areas. Winona will share stories of indigenous land management practices and how they are informing current land stewardship and conservation.

All of the lectures are at 8 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts, 500 Castro St. in downtown Mountain View. Ticket information is here.

Proceeds from the lecture series support POST’s work to protect Silicon Valley-area open space, farms and parkland.

POST’s Wallace Stegner Lectures began in 1993 and pays tribute to the conservation legacy of the late writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Stanford University professor and ardent spokesman for the West’s wild places, the organization said. The late Ambassador Laurence W. Bill Lane and his wife, Jean, have sponsored the Wallace Stegner Lectures from their inception. Jean continues this tradition of sponsorship in memory of Bill, who passed away in 2010.

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-- Pixabay image via Couleur