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This Week: "War on ourselves" and "war on our environment" is how Alexandra Fuller describes what's happening in Wyoming. The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a gripping story about the new American West. The Economist calls it "a modern western" that "hangs so faultlessly on its high-altitude, big-sky, oil-drilling bones that it seems not so much to have been written as uncovered by the wind and weather of the American north-west." Alexandra Fuller won the international Ulysses Prize for literary reportage in 2005. Ms. Fuller’s book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant takes place in the gas and oil fields of Wyoming, USA, where she lives. Born in the U.K., she grew up in Africa in the midst of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s civil war, then in Malawi and Zambia. She explores those years and their aftermath in her best-seller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat. In addition to writing books, Ms. Fuller is published widely in magazines, including The New Yorker and National Geographic, and in newspapers including The New York Times. |
Next Week: Let's Try this Another Way Organic sytems cannot grow forever. They are constrained by physics and the resource constraints of the environments of which they are part. Humans and our "econosphere" are similarly constrained. How are we to cope with limits to growth? Bill McKibben suggests that we must find "another way." In Mr. McKibben's 1989 book, The End of Nature, this widely acclaimed writer and environmentalist catapulted global warming into mainstream consciousness. Between then and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, he has become one of the world’s most respected voices championing a livable future on earth. He has written a series of influential books, is an adjunct professor, appears in all kinds of publications, is regularly in the mass media representing solutions and responsibilities to environmental crises, organizes grassroots efforts urging political action on global climate change and draws attention to its crisis proportions at the website: 350.org. This Program with Bill McKibben will be here at 5 PM GMT, Sunday, July 6. |
1:20With Tibet back in the news, we're pleased to be able to help contextualize what's happening there. Last week we recorded with Buddhist scholar and author Robert Thurman (Why the Dalai Lama Matters); and Thomas Laird (The Story of Tibet) will be back with us for a return visit. Dr. Thurman argues that by reaching an accommodation with H.H. the Dalai Lama, the Government of the Peoples' Republic of China could take a major step beyond the historical habit of "great power" colonialism and empire-building, generate genuine respect from the global community and solve an seemingly intractable problem. Mr. Laird is less optimistic. The July edition of Harper's features two of our guests, Kevin Phillips and Kevin Baker, in a discussion about the future, or not, of the Republican Party. |
