Empathy Rooted in Action | Terry Tempest Williams

Becoming Wise

On Being Studios

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.2 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2019

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Naturalist Terry Tempest Williams brings meaning and direction to the grief around ecological loss and climate change. She’s a self-described “citizen writer” rooted in the American West, and she draws connections between fierce love and hard work — both in the natural world and the human world. “It all comes down to relationships, to place, to paying attention, to staying, to listening, to learning — of a heightened curiosity with other,” Williams says. Williams is a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. Her books include “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice,” “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” and most recently, “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks.” Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.
0:05.0	I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.
0:17.0	Terry Tempest Williams is a beloved naturalist raised Mormon in Utah. She calls herself
0:23.2	a citizen writer rooted in the American West. I love the connections she draws in the natural
0:29.8	world, but also the human world, between fierce love and hard work.
0:39.4	This is becoming wise.
0:40.8	I'm Krista Tippett.
1:05.3	You have been part of what I would say has been a growing movement awareness about the natural world.
1:08.5	You mean, you've been steeped in it, I think, from childhood.
1:31.0	I just wonder if you think about, if you'd reflect on how that whole sphere of waking up to the natural world and our place in it, which has many dimensions, what that experience is teaching us that might be useful in this political moment, this cultural moment.
1:39.6	You know, I think about Great Salt Lake growing up as a child, you know, you went to it once.
1:45.7	You ran in, you screamed, and you ran out, and you drove home pickled, you know, because kids have scratches on their legs. And, you know, it was a horrible experience. Today, in 50 years
1:53.7	in my lifetime, Great Salt Lake is being celebrated. And every year in May, we have a Great Salt
1:59.6	Lake Bird Festival. You know, that would
2:01.3	have been unthinkable then, you know, and the connectivity that's being made of the birds in
2:06.4	Great Salt Lake, you know, are coming down from the Arctic or going down to Mexico, even into the
2:11.3	Gulf of Mexico so that when we see a tragedy like the oil spill in the Gulf, you know, that doesn't just affect
2:20.3	people who live in Louisiana or Alabama or Mississippi.
2:23.3	People know their connection to it. Yeah. Those are, you know, I heard one of my nieces
2:27.1	say, you know, those are our pelicans too. So there's that connectedness that is local that extends
2:33.3	beyond our home ground. I think there's something that we that is local that extends beyond our home ground.
2:36.1	I think there's something that we are losing that I really grieve and I worry about.
	...

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