New curator, really old dinosaur!

Randall B. Irmis joined the Utah Museum of Natural History as curator of paleontology at the beginning of this year with a freshly-minted doctorate! This week, his identification of a new dinosaur species, Tawa hallae, was published in the journal Science. This discovery was made by a team that includes scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, the State University of New York in Stony brook, and the University of Texas.

I talked with Randy earlier this week about his work and how a paleontologist discovers something new that is also over 200 million years old!

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JF: What are the big questions for you in your research at this point?
RBI: Well, most of my work has focused on the early Mesozoic Era (250-180 million years ago), and particularly during the Late Triassic (235-201 m.y.a.). For my Ph.D. dissertation, I investigated the origin and rise of early dinosaurs. I’m particularly interested in why dinosaurs became so successful, whereas other contemporaneous groups fell by the wayside. I also want to know how terrestrial ecosystems during this time responded to global climate change, similar to changes we are seeing today.

JF: Tell us about the new species of dinosaur that is part of your research publication?
RBI: This week we announced the publication of a new species of early carnivorous dinosaur called Tawa hallae, discovered in northern New Mexico at a place called Ghost Ranch. “Tawa” is the Hopi name for the Pueblo sun god, and is a reference to the rich Native American heritage in the area where the fossils were discovered, as well as to New Mexico itself, whose state symbol is a Puebloan representation of the sun. The species name “hallae” is for Ruth Hall, the woman who founded the paleontology museum at Ghost Ranch.

Tawa was found in rocks called the Chinle Formation, and is approximately 213 million years old. This places it in a time period called the Late Triassic, when all the continents were together as a super continent called Pangaea. During this time, North America was near the equator and had a warm and seasonal climate.

JF: What makes Tawa special to science?
RBI: The fossils are really complete and well-preserved; we have pretty much every bone in the body. The new species fills a gap in the evolutionary tree between the earliest carnivorous dinosaurs Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor (from Argentina), and later Triassic carnivorous dinosaurs like Coelophysis (also found at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico).

Using data from Tawa and other species, we were able to determine that the first dinosaurs evolved in South America, and then spread across Pangaea. In fact, the three species of carnivorous dinosaurs we find at Ghost Ranch each represent separate emigration events from the southern continents. This indicates that early dinosaurs were able to freely move across Pangaea without interference from physical barriers such as mountain ranges.

What’s really interesting is that some other dinosaur groups, namely ornithischians and sauropodomorphs, never made it to North America during the Triassic. This got us wondering – why didn’t these two groups arrive in North America when it is clear that early dinosaurs could freely move around? We think it has to do with climate – areas near the equator during the Triassic weren’t hospitable to the ornithischian and sauropodomorph dinosaurs, but the carnivorous dinosaurs could tolerate it.

JF: What drew you to conducting fieldwork in Ghost Ranch?
RBI: Ghost Ranch is world famous for the discovery of many skeletons of the Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis bauri, in addition to other lesser-known paleontological discoveries in the Late Triassic rocks there. It has always been a mecca for Triassic paleontologists. In fact, some of the very first Triassic vertebrate fossils to be described from the western U.S. were discovered in the vicinity of Ghost Ranch in the 1870s.

All of us on the research team had been to Ghost Ranch as paleontological tourists, but our field research there really was a result of serendipitous events starting in 2004. During the fall of that year, Sterling Nesbitt and I attended the Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Denver, Colorado. At that meeting, Alex Downs from the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology, showed us some early dinosaur bones from a new site, called the Hayden Quarry, that he was excavating at Ghost Ranch. We got excited, because they looked to be a new species.

We agreed to work with Alex on scientifically describing the new material, and the next spring we went to Ghost Ranch to do this work. When we got there, we were amazed at how many early dinosaur specimens had been excavated from the site – it was a treasure trove! Sterling and I spent only an afternoon at the site and we discovered half a dozen dinosaur bones. This was unprecedented for Triassic rocks in North America. No one else had ever found a site of this age where early dinosaur specimens were so numerous. So, we resolved to return the next summer, to begin large scale excavations.

During our first season of excavation, we were fortunate to discover several nearly complete skeletons, which ultimately gave us a complete picture of this new species. It has taken three years of lab work to remove these bones from the rock that encases them.

JF: What does it mean to be classified as “a new species”?
RBI: As paleontologists, we typically only have bones to look at when trying to distinguish different species. We look for anatomical characters on the bones – bumps, ridges, depressions, and other small features – that tell us if a specimen is distinct or not. If a fossil specimen has a unique character or unique combination of anatomical characters preserved on the bones, these tells us it is a new species not known to science.

But we have to be careful – we compare the bones to all other known species first to make sure that some other species don’t already have these anatomical characters on the bones. This requires a lot of time and effort – particularly visiting museums across the world to look at their fossil collections.

JF: That sounds like fun work! How do you work with artists to come up with a rendering of what the dinosaur may have looked like?
RBI: A good paleoartist has an excellent knowledge of anatomy, and there is a constant dialogue between the artist and scientists as work progresses. We provide images of the bones, our skeletal reconstruction, notes on anatomy, things like that to the artist to give them an idea of what the skeleton looked like.

The artist then uses their knowledge of anatomy of living relatives of the dinosaur -- like, birds, for example -- to flesh out the skeleton and bring the animal to life. As the artist works, they’ll provide sketches and preliminary renderings that us as scientists can comment on and make suggestions. Jorge Gonzalez was our paleoartist, and he did an amazing job!

JF: How do you know that this is what this species looked like?
RBI: Some of it we know based on the skeleton, whereas other parts are scientifically informed inferences. For example, the general body and head shape is clear from the complete skeletons we have. But we don’t know for sure what color Tawa was, or what it was covered in. You’ll notice that Jorge’s reconstruction of Tawa is covered in a downy plumage of “protofeathers.”

Although we only have the bones of Tawa, we know from fantastic discoveries of fossils with soft tissue preservation from China that a wide variety of dinosaurs had these protofeathers. So, we thought it was a reasonable inference that Tawa would have had a similar covering.

Color really is up to the artist – but even here we can make some guesses. For example, carnivores today generally aren’t a garish bright color, because they don’t want their potential prey to spot them prematurely. So it’s a reasonable guess that as a carnivore, Tawa also had a subdued color scheme.

JF: How can the public see the fossils?
RBI: We’ll have original fossils of Tawa, along with fossils of other creatures from the same time, on display in the Utah Museum of Natural History lobby for the next few months – so I encourage you all to come down and see them! I’ll also be doing a special presentation in the museum from Noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 12th.

JF: You participate in several Scientist in the Spotlight events like this at the Museum. What will people see when they come Saturday?
RBI: I’ll have a variety of original dinosaur fossils available for people to see up close. We also demonstrate how specimens are removed in the lab from their rocky tombs, and show what it’s like to excavate dinosaurs in the field.

JF: How does this new research, and your work in general, contribute to the overall work of the Museum and the University of Utah?
RBI: UMNH has a long tradition of dinosaur research, and is currently one of the only museums in the world to have an active research program in all three periods of the Age of Dinosaurs. In recent years, we’ve been particularly strong in studying the latter two geologic periods of the Age of Dinosaurs, the Jurassic and Cretaceous. My research gives us expertise and active research in the Triassic, at the beginning of the dinosaur age.

JF: What are you working on next?
RBI: I have a variety of Triassic and early dinosaur research projects in the works right now. Several of these should be published in the coming year. Look for a major announcement about the earliest relatives of dinosaurs in early 2010! I’m also involved in the long-term Kaiparowits Basin Project, which aims to understand terrestrial ecosystems from the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, during the Late Cretaceous (80-70 m.y.a.) in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of southern Utah. We have discovered a variety of new dinosaur species, some of which we hope will be announced in the next year.

JF: One last question: How did you end up as a paleontologist, anyway?
RBI: I always wanted to be a paleontologist since my childhood love affair with dinosaurs. As I got older, my interests broadened to geology and evolutionary biology, but I never lost sight of the goal of becoming a paleontologist. In college, I majored in Geology with an emphasis in Paleontology, and got involved in several undergraduate research projects. This propelled me into the field, and I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Ph.D. program at University of California, Berkeley. The rest, as they say, is history!

To see photos and the paleoartist's rendition of Tawa hallae, visit umnh.utah.edu/dinos

Follow up with Scott Sampson

Last month, we spoke with Scott just prior to his visit to Utah to launch his new book Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life.

I followed up with Scott to see how the launch of his book and his new blog are going:

JF: How did your lecture in Salt Lake City go month?
SS: It was a terrific experience for me! It was certainly fitting that my book tour was launched in Utah, given my involvement with dinosaur paleontology there over the past decade. And it was particularly heart-warming to be surrounded by friends and long-time supporters of paleontology, including numerous volunteers who have put in long hours in the field and the lab. I had a great time, in particular, interacting with all those kids who are getting even more hooked on dinosaurs from watching [Jim Henson's] Dinosaur Train. The question & answer period was fun and surprising, and, as usual, the kids asked the best questions!

JF: What has the initial response to the book been?
SS: Although we are still in the early days (the formal release date of the book was last week, November 30th), Dinosaur Odyssey has had some extremely positive reviews. An author never knows how a book is going to be received, so it feels great to see one’s writing described with words like “engaging”. I am particularly excited that so many readers are picking up not only on the web of life approach, which aims to make diverse connections, but also on the fact that we humans still have a lot to learn from dinosaurs.

JF: Tell us about the blog that you have just launched?
SS: I launched The Whirlpool of Life on Tuesday, November 24, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Posts will encompass a wide range of topics, spanning paleontology, evolution, ecology, education, sustainability, philosophy, and psychology. The thread that I will use to weave these topics together is science education in general, and nature literacy more specifically.

JF: How is the work of Darwin relevant today, 150-years later?
SS: Darwin triggered an intellectual revolution, with effects that have cascaded through science and society. Yet, one hundred and fifty years later, a portion of Darwin’s legacy, the foundational concept of common descent through deep time, remains virtually untapped outside academia. In particular, this concept has not been communicated in such a way as to shift our relationship with nature.

JF: When did Charles Darwin first enter your consciousness?
SS: As I recall, Darwin first entered my consciousness as a 14 year-old student in ninth grade biology class. But this introduction was anything but inspiring, and it really wasn’t until my undergraduate years at the University of British Columbia that I truly began to plumb the depths of evolutionary thinking.

JF: As a paleontologist, what contribution do you feel museum collections make to science and culture?
SS: Museums are the storehouses of living and ancient life. Fossil collections are used by researchers to conduct science. Some of the greatest “aha!” moments in paleontology occur in the bowels of museums when one is surrounded by the bones of ancient creatures.

Of course, museums also spark the imaginations of non-scientists too, and this is another of their crucial roles. Now it is time for natural history museums to enter the 21st century and define their place in helping the general public connect more deeply with the natural world.

Natural history museums were founded by people with a true love of nature, people who understood the plants and animals of their region, people who were naturalists. Today there are all too few naturalists around. Indeed the skill of knowing one’s place and communicating it to others might be regarded as a disappearing art. Yet this skill is more needed now than ever before. Natural history museums need to go back to their roots and foster a world of naturalists!

JF: What attracted you to paleontology as a field of study?
SS: I was the classic 5 year-old with a fascination for dinosaurs. Without any exaggeration, paleontology was one of the first words I learned how to spell. For me, one of the most attractive aspects of paleontology is that it requires mental time travel to places from the distant past. Imagining those worlds excited me as a youngster, and that excitement is still there today.


JF: With a book and a blog both geared for people like me (not a professional scientist) and involvement in popular, almost mass media television shows, you seem to have moved beyond a life of traditional academic work. Can you tell us about that, ahem, evolution?
SS: In short, I felt that the pressing issues facing us today required that I move beyond the narrow domain of paleontology research and education within a university. My underlying contention is that the current sustainability crisis is not merely an external crisis of the environment. More fundamentally, it is an internal crisis of worldview rooted in a dysfunctional relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. Thus, any meaningful resolution to the eco-crisis will require not only more and “greener” technologies, but also a fundamental shift in awareness and understanding, particularly within industrialized nations.

Since worldviews are built upon a lifetime of experience, it’s highly doubtful that the necessary transformation will occur solely among adults. Rather we must rethink, indeed reinvent, education, placing less emphasis on upward mobility and more on living well; less on generating consumers and more on serving communities, including communities of nature. Surprisingly, perhaps, I am convinced that the concept of evolution has a pivotal role to play in this gargantuan effort of “schooling for sustainability”.

JF: Tell us more about “schooling for sustainability”....
SS: Schooling for sustainability should be rooted in three intertwined elements, each of which informs the other two:

• new metaphors that augment the dominant “life-as-machine” and “web of life examples, enabling us to perceive reality in new and instructive ways;
  
• the Great Story encompassing the evolution of cosmos, life, and culture, which provides a universal origin myth and anchors us in the deep time evolution of life on Earth; and
• a strong emphasis on place.

Together, this trio of elements—metaphor, story, and place—have the power to transform education and help trigger a change in the dominant worldview, thereby serving as a springboard to a sustainable future.

JF: How can public education organizations — like natural history museums and public television — play a role in “schooling for sustainability”
SS: I see two fundamental roles for natural history museums and other natural science institutions in this redefinition of education. First, museums of natural history—home to both extensive collections and scientific expertise--are better positioned than perhaps any other institutions to communicate the nature of place and reconnect people to their local environs. Second, museums can communicate the Great Story, linking the origin of the universe, of life, and of humanity into a single story, and related that story back to their home regions. In particular, great potential exists for museums to help school teachers access the information and resources necessary for them to feel comfortable teaching these big ideas to their students.

However, both of these efforts will require that museum get beyond their four walls and guide visitors in direct experiences with nature. Television, on the other hand, is currently much more a part of the problem than the solution. To turn this situation around, public television in particular has potential to generate even more programming that helps viewers reconnect with the natural settings around their homes. And television too needs to do a much better job of communicating the Great Story at age-appropriate levels.

JF: One last question: Since the Museum's blog is a community exchange of ideas and books, what book is on your nightstand these days??
SS: I am currently reading a marvelous, though frighting, book by Lester Brown called, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Norton, 2009). If ever there was a succinct description of our current ecological predicament, together with necessary steps that must be taken, this is it. Highly recommended!

Conversation with "Dr. Scott"

The UMNH team has been preparing for our colleague and friend's lecture in Salt Lake City this evening. Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist and UMNH research curator, is launching his new book, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, in Salt Lake City tonight! This public event kicks off of over six months of visits, lectures, signings, special appearances and more across the continent. Not the lost one, but the one we currently know as North America!

Reading through the first hundred pages of Scott's book -- and working on the communications materials for Scott's visit -- has been great fun because we can see how Scott's ideas, research topics, themes, and, quite frankly, passion that we know from working with him have come together into a new, bold, and very public forum. For Scott, it's not just about dinosaurs (although, he does love them!). It is about how we, the human species, can learn from dinosaurs -- the way they lived, the way they lived together, the ways in which they went extinct or evolved into species alive today -- a deeper understanding of our own intricate relationship with the natural world.

Scott and I have been conversing electronically over these past several weeks, and we'd like to bring you into the conversation:

JF: Scott, as a dinosaur paleontologist who often thinks in terms of millions of years of deep time, your work tends to unfold at a relatively slow pace. How is all that going for you these days?
SS: 2009 has been an action-packed year both for the study of dinosaurs and for me personally, with plenty of new discoveries and projects. Dinosaur Train, an animated kids show produced by the Jim Henson Company and now airing daily on PBS, premiered on Labor Day following an intense year of production. As the science advisor and on-air host of the series, "Dr. Scott", I have had great fun with this project, and those of us involved have been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response received both from children and parents. Two days before the show first aired, I had the pleasure of kicking off this national series for an audience of families right here in Salt Lake City at the Utah Museum of Natural History.

This month, my book, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, will finally be published, the culmination of several years of work.

JF: I am enjoying working my way through the opening pages of your book. Can you give us an overview of the story you've set out to tell?
SS: This book describes both the ancient world of dinosaurs and the present-day world of paleontology. It represents the first attempt to provide a general audience summary of the entire field of dinosaur paleontology in about a generation—a generation that has witnessed more discoveries of “new” dinosaurs than in all prior history combined. More important, at least from my perspective, the book utilizes these amazing creatures as a window into understanding not just the ancient Earth of the Mesozoic, but today’s changing world as well.

It is perhaps ironic that long-extinct animals like dinosaurs can inform our present-day situation, but that is exactly my contention. Dinosaurs lived in a hothouse world characterized by climates that far exceed the most dire present day climate predictions. They suffered the last major extinction endured by our biosphere, although we may now be in the middle of another such event. And, through their living descendants, the birds, dinosaurs help anchor us into the story of everything, from the Big Bang to us, a story that needs to be communicated today more than ever before.

JF: I can't believe that after, what 150 or so years, paleontologists are still discovering new dinosaurs! And, in listening to the UMNH paleo team, it seems that what we know about them, even how they are drawn or portrayed in museums, is changing!
SS: One of the key points I try to make in the book is that the body of scientific knowledge is always changing. This does not mean that all scientific ideas are tentative or prone to easy dismissal. But new findings are made all the time that cause us to re-evaluate long-held assumptions.

In the realm of dinosaur paleontology, Utah is an exemplar in the realm of shifting ideas. Research conducted over the past decade by our group from the University of Utah -- through the Utah Museum of Natural History and the Department of Geology and Geophysics -- has unearthed a previously unknown assemblage of dinosaurs, from ornate horned herbivores to giant tyrannosaur meat-eaters. Many of these beasts are so new that they have yet to be given names.

Most of these discoveries are being made in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah; this fall, UMNH crews working in a single quarry unearthed the nearly complete skull of a giant duck-billed dinosaur (to go with the skeleton found previously), the skull and partial skeleton of an huge armored dinosaur, a nearly complete turtle and crocodile, and some other strange bones that may turn out to belong to some sort of flying reptile.

JF: Where does the "lost continent" come into the story?
SS: Well, around 75 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous Period, these dinosaurs and many others lived on an island continent of sorts, formed by the flooding of the central region of North America, from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The marooned western landmass, today known as Laramidia, witnessed what is arguably the greatest known florescence of dinosaurs.

All of these finds and more are causing us to question some long held ideas about the world of dinosaurs. Why did so many different and wondrous varieties of dinosaurs evolve here? How were so many giants able to co-exist on a chunk of land less than one-fifth the size of present day North America? Why should we care about animals that disappeared so long ago? Those are the questions that I've started to address in my book, and, in my lectures will try to answer.

JF: You have been working with these themes and ideas over the past decade of your involvement with the Museum. Now that the book is released, what happens next?
SS: Well, in support of the book, I will be conducting a North American speaking tour that will include at least 15 cities in the US and Canada. I am very excited to be launching this tour in the same locale that the book found its origins - Salt Lake City, Utah! So, if folks want to learn more about Utah’s pivotal role in the world of dinosaur paleontology, please join us for the event or one that will happen in another city.


And we are, too! We hope you can join us with Scott this evening and continue to follow the development of his ideas and research in the months ahead! Event details, including location and times, can be found at www.umnh.utah.edu/dinos.

The UMNH Book Group will be discussion Dinosaur Odyssey both at the Museum and online in January 2010. Follow the blog or join our mailing list to be notified of details!

Scott D. Sampson is research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah, author of several articles and books including Dinosaur Odyssey, scientific advisor and on-air host of Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train, and much more!

You can follow Scott's book tour and blog at www.scottsampson.net. And we'll check in on him from time to time on this blog as well!

The Gift of Good Land

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural is again available in paperback, published by Counterpoint (Berkeley, CA). I've finally begun to weave through these essays by Wendell Berry, written mostly between 1979 and 1981, when the collection was originally released.

Through these essays, most of which were originally published in magazines, Berry questions the true value and costs of economies of scale, the basis of the Cold War era United States Department of Agriculture ethic of "Get Big or Get Out". With my professional background in wholesale distribution sales and marketing, I've always put great faith in economies of scale and the benefits of driving the costs out of distribution, out of the supply change. However, based upon the UMNH Book Club reading, I have come to question our current industrial food system, and the viability of the small farmer. Have the economies of scale gone too far? Are we losing from land fertility, biodiversity, economic sustainability and community culture more that we are gaining?

These are issues Berry raised 30 years ago, and yet it seems that only in the past five years have they started to hit the national dialogue. What has caused our national community to be so slow to respond to Berry's call for small farming and the protection of biodiversity as well as the health of humans, animals, and soil? Does the “fault” lay within our "get big or get out" culture? Is it a lack of understanding on the part of especially urban and metropolitan citizens? Is it because of the strength of special interest and agribusiness on policy? And what are the land-use policies within our own state? Are they supportive of small-scale farming and sustainable agriculture??

Our partner in the Wendell Berry discussion is the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, an excellent program within the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. The Stegner Center brought Wendell Berry to Utah this past March as part of the Stegner Symposium, which celebrated the centennial of Wallace Stegner's birth and explored his legacy in the West.

The last time we partnered with the Stegner Center, we discussed Robert Keiter's book, Keeping Faith with Nature: Ecosystems, Democracy, and America's Public Lands. Keiter himself participated in our book club discussion. I was struck by his perspective, as a lawyer, on how Congress takes a long view of local resolution on conservation, preservation, and land-use issues, before establishing federal policy, perhaps 30 or more years. Is that the same case with small farming practices and agricultural land-use policies? Are there examples of local communities taking back some of the small farming practices and land-use allocations toward a more diverse and sustainable agriculture and food system?

Joining our discussion of Berry's essays on Monday, September 21, will be Amy Wildermuth, an environmental law professor and Wendell Berry aficionado, representing the Stegner Center. Amy has invited her brother, Todd Wildermuth, to join the conversation as well. Todd's areas of expertise include land use and agricultural policy, plus he's a Berry fan as well. I'd love to be a guest at their family gathering table, but, in lieu of that, we look forward to talking with Amy and Todd over the next couple of weeks both at the book club and here on the blog.

With the harvest and more farmer's markets than ever in full-swing, it is a good time to join the community conversation on agricultural land use. There are several initiatives percolating and I invite anyone involved in land use, small farming practices and local food production to join the conversation. I understand that a group, working in conjunction with the Salt Lake City Mayor's Office, has formed to (re) establish a Food Policy Council along the Wasatch Front. Slow Food Utah is hosting Time for Lunch Campaign on Monday, September 7, to inspire locals to take a stand on improving children's health. And just last month, the Salt Lake Tribune ran two interesting articles relating to these issues:

• On 8/13/09, Dawn House wrote in the Business Section on the challenges of finding available land for small, local farming.

• On 8/18/09, Jeremiah Stettler wrote on plans to increase urban farming in Salt Lake County.

It's a good time for a community discussion on The Gift of Good Land. Join us!

Summer Reading!

Hope that you have had many opportunities for good summer reading this year! Here are some updates on books, authors, and more relating to the UMNH Book Club!

1. We had a spirited conversation on July 13 about Paul Roberts' The End of Food. People, at least the ones who attend book clubs on food books, have strong opinions about what is acceptable and unacceptable in the food-supply. It was great having Christi Paulson of Slow Food Utah leading the discussion.

It struck me as we were debating organic vs. non-organic produce, and regaining the lost arts of jam and condiment making, that we are lucky to be having that conversation. Perhaps organic vs. non-organic is a bit splitting hairs as long as we agree to avoid the rows and rows of boxed and processed food that lies between the produce and the dairy section. Hmmm.

2. Due mostly to publishing release dates, we've ended up with two food-related books in a row, much to the chagrin of some members. Our next book to discuss is The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays on Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry. We selected this book at the recommendation of Anne Holman of The King's English Bookshop before Mr. Berry's visit to Utah in March for the Stegner Symposium. Our partner in this discussion, scheduled for Monday, September 21, is the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, the University of Utah.

I've just talked with the booksellers at the King's English, and the new edition of The Gift of Good Land is now in! I'm on my way to pick up my copy and will strive to post a few times before the 9/21/09 discussion. Join me!

3. The authors, scientists and thought-leaders we encounter at the Museum -- through the Nature of Things lecture series and the UMNH Book Club -- are busy folk. Here are some updates on past and future authors:

• E.O. Wilson, inaugural keynote speaker in 2007, is returning to Utah this Saturday, August 15, to participate in the lovely Sundance Author Series. We've heard this morning that tickets are still available at www.sundanceresort.com/create and click on Events. Tickets are $95 and include brunch in the award-winning Tree Room, plus a signed copy of a new edition of Wilson's book, On Human Nature.
• Michael Pollan, whose Omnivore's Delimma was the UMNH Book Club's July 2006 selection, and who delivered the Nature of Things 2008 keynote lecture, has been all the buzz this summer with the release of the film Food, Inc. Last week, UMNH heard that the Salt Lake Film Society had extended screenings of the film at the Broadway Theater in Salt Lake City for a week or two, due to strong community support.
• Gary Hirshberg, president of Stonyfield Yogurt, is also featured in Food, Inc., as indication of how business can be financially successful while integrating the company’s social, environmental, and financial missions. UMNH is in the process of finalizing a date for Hirshberg to participate in the Nature of Things lecture series in March 2010. The complete series line-up will be announced this fall, and subscribers to this blog will be among the first to know!

4. We are still waiting for Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom #1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum to be delivered in paperback. The King's English tells us September. We'll cross our fingers and hope we have time to delight in Fortey's great stories of the people, places and adventures that make up THE Natural History Museum in London. Some UMNH staff members are dying to share their stories as well at the November discussion.

5. And, it's time again to look for books to read in the coming year and for interesting people to read them with! The Utah Society of Environmental Education is interested in reading Stephen Trimble and Gary Nabhan's The Geography of Childhood with us next spring, a great way to discuss how to reconnect our children and our families with nature.

I would like to explore some of the science behind climate change and am looking for recommendations.

I'm intrigued by The Superorganism: The beauty, elegance and strangeness of insect societies by Bert Holldobler and E.O.Wilson, however it's size and cost are a bit daunting. Please send me your thoughts for natural science and environmental books to explore next year.

Enjoy the rest of your reading summer!

The End of Food

The UMNH Book Club will meet to discuss The End of Food by Paul Roberts on Monday, July 13, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. This book was recommended to us by Slow Food Utah, who will be contributing to the Book Club discussion next week.

I'm just getting started on Roberts' book, but immediately realized that the title is more daunting and discouraging than the text. The book is a very interesting read!

As I personally have been exploring our industrialized food supply (starting with Omnivore's Dilemma in this Book Club two years ago), I have continually asked myself, "How did we get here? How did we just hand over our food system to the interests of chemical fertilizers and bottom-line profits?"

The first chapter of this book, "Starving for Progress", lays out "how we got here" over the past three million years, starting with Australopithecus, "a diminutive ancestor who lived in the prehistoric African forest and ate mainly what could be found there -- fruits, leaves, larvae and bugs." Over the next 20 pages or so, the author recaps how the quest for food and survival drove the development of modern humans, civilization and, ultimately, a global society and food supply. The chapter illustrates the intricate relationship between humans being, the ever-changing environments and climates in which they live, and the desire to create predictability in their resources. It is like a speed-read through several anthropology and political science courses in one sitting!

But the reading challenges my organic leanings as being symptomatic of luxury. The fact is, predictability in food and other natural resources is a good thing. It creates opportunity for individuals and civilizations to do more things that hunt for and produce food. Was there a moment in time when this desire for predictability and "enough" went to far? Was it in the mid-twentieth century when we added chemical fertilizers and carbon-based machinery in an attempt to be masters over nature, thereby changing the very thing we call food? Or was in 3500 B.C., when Egyptian wheat farmers were "routinely producing more grain than they could eat themselves, and these surpluses" let to trade and the first accumulate wealth? Agriculture itself is a mastery over nature. Yet, did human society cross a line in 1957, when, according to Roberts, "Ray Goldberg, the Harvard economist, and his colleague, John Davis, proposed that term "agriculture" be replaced with a new, more fitting one: "agribusiness."

Food is the fundamental way in which we as humans -- as living beings -- interact with the natural world. Food, or energy from which to live, creates the "place of humans" within the natural world, referring to the Museum's mission statement. So far, this book and others I've read provide data to the balance between calories produced by the earth and calories needed -- and how that balance changes over time. The questions are popping in my mind. Join the Museum and Slow Food Utah for a discussion of this book, and will raise your own questions and comments here or at the discussion on 7/13/09!

For more information on the meeting, visit us at www.umnh.utah.edu/bookclub.

Onto Chapter 2: "It's So Easy Now"....

It's all Connected

We started out organizing these entries by the title of the book we were discussing. But we've realized, that is not going to work. This discussion, the themes and memes covered in these readings, are to intertwined. Just as in our Book Club meetings, in which we refer back to past discussions to enrich the current book, these conversations sort of weave into a larger tapestry of thought. A larger discussion on the place of humans in the natural world.

For me this year, it all started in early March listening to Terry Tempest-Williams presenting at the Wallace Stegner Center of Land, Resources and the Environment's annual symposium. As this year marks the 100th anniversary of Stegner's birth, the symposium was dedicated to Stegner's life and legacy. Terry reflected on Stegner's advice to her and Charles Wilkinson in their work to protect wilderness lands in Southern Utah. Stegner's advice? Be bold! Saving wilderness is protecting the place in which our humanity has a place to breathe. I asked myself: What in my life is worth fighting to save?

The next week, Thomas Friedman was in town. He discussed the "Americum", the measure of people in the world living the "American lifestyle" in terms of consumption. It struck me that it is our moral responsibility as Americans to redefine the "American Dream" so that it can be protected, so that it can expand and more people in this world can live with basic food security, clean water, healthcare, education, justice, and opportunity; but so that the balance of life on this planet can be sustained -- including places of wilderness, I would guess. And in his discussion, and especially in the reading of his book, it was evident that the market has been heavily changed by the lobbying of oil companies and auto manufacturers who have ensured that carbon fuel was cheap, easy to attain, and guzzled up by large "American Made" automobiles.
what is worth protecting? I want people across the world to have the same basics that I have. Am I willing to give up on the intense excess, recalibrate the American dream, so that more people can live with safety, security, and peace? What portion of "the American lifestyle" is worth fighting for, worth saving?

A couple of weeks later, a group of local community members formed a discussion group on the Northwest Earth Institute's "Menu for the Future". Together, all of us women living in Salt Lake City with school-aged children, we have spent the past six weeks exploring issues of the food supply. Corporate agriculture, fossil fuels in the food supply chain, pesticides and additives in our food supply, explotation and effects from pesticide exposure of agriculture workers. All while Michelle Obama is taking heat for choosing organic growing practices on the White House lawn. And what is our largest concern is as mothers is the time and cost of restoring nature -- faith -- in our families' food. We start to ask ourselves, "we've placed such a value on convenience because we are so busy. Why are we so busy?" What is worth protecting?? Isn't the health of our families, and the time we can spend together growing, sourcing, cooking, sharing food worth protecting??

Then Tyrone Hayes comes to Salt Lake to finish up the Nature of Things 2009. He talks about the effects of the agricultural pesticide Atrazine in frog populations. And there it is again: 80 million pounds of Atrazine used in American agriculture each year, corporate reaction to research indicating that Atrazine is causing hormonal change in frog populations living in waters with agricultural run off, documentation that when the company realized that Atrazine was contributing to hormonal changes that stimulated some cancers, they then established a new division to create a pharmaceutical that can reduce the hormonal changes -- rather than removing the Atrazine from the market, they are now selling the pesticide to the agriculture industry and the cancer-treatment pharmeceutal through the healthcare treatment. Tyrone's final call? Get politically active to call for better testing, integrative evaluation of pesticides so that the real story can be told. The future is in your hands. Is that worth fighting for?

It starts to feel that we are living in a society in which the basics have traded out for convience, profit, predictablity.

Wendell Berry: where we are headed....