Access Utah

With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years, now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned. But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease on life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriet’s past.

Dr. Douglas Johnston is a scholar, diplomat, peacemaker, and the youngest officer in the Navy to qualify for command of a nuclear submarine. He is founder and president of the Washington DC based International Center for Religion and Diplomacy.

The next night, during the school's homecoming football game, members of the Copper Hills American Indian Student Association collected more than 190 signatures on a petition calling for cultural awareness and tolerance.

Community farms. Mud spas. Mineral paints. Nematodes. The world is waking up to the beauty and mystery of dirt. This anthology celebrates the Earth's generous crust, bringing together essays by award-winning scientists, authors, artists, and dirt lovers to tell dirt's exuberant tales.

Today on the program we're discussing food, starting with the latest food movement here in the U.S., food trucks. Serving food from mobile kitchens has turned into a 800 million dollar industry, as the National Geographic recently reported, citing various economic perks of food trucks rather than brick and mortar restaurants.

As part of Utah State University's Year of Water, Access Utah arranged a conversation about all-things water.

Rita Moreno is one of few people to hold the awards "Grand Slam" -- Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony. In her twenties, after her Oscar win for "West Side Story," she didn't work in Hollywood again for seven years, because she refused stereotyped roles. She's see as a trailblazer. And she's having, at 83, a well-deserved very good year.

Award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney says “forgiveness is elusive, mysterious, primal...an idea and an ache that is rooted in existential concerns.” PBS describes her film Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate this way: It “provides an intimate look into the spontaneous outpouring of forgiveness: from the Amish families for the 2006 shooting of their children in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvani...

Writer David Quammen's working life bounces back and forth between topics such as grizzly bear conservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, close to home, and the study of lethal viruses that emerge from bats and chimpanzees and rodents in places like the Congo. Quammen will present on Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world, at this year's Shift Festival in Jackson W...

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge...

“Is suicide wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Sometimes morally permissible? Imprudent, but not wrong? Is it sick, a matter of mental illness? Is it a private matter or a largely social one? Could it sometimes be right, or a "noble duty," or even a fundamental human right? Whether it is called "suicide" or not, what role may a person play in the en...

The 21st Annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture will take place in the Logan Tabernacle, 50 N. Main Street, on Thursday, September 24, at 7 p.m. The title is "Narrating Jane: Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman." Jane Elizabeth Manning James was among the early African American converts to Mormonism. After joining the church in the early 1840s, James remained a...

This is an encore presentation of "Access Utah."

Born in 1861 in New Mexico’s Acoma Pueblo, Edward Proctor Hunt lived a tribal life almost unchanged for centuries. But after attending government schools he broke with his people’s ancient codes to become a shopkeeper and controversial broker between Indian and white worlds. As a Wild West Show Indian he travelled in Europe with his family, and saw his sons become silversmiths, painters, and consu...

“In New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, 106 Mexican gray wolves may be some of the most monitored wildlife on the planet. Collared, microchipped, and transported by helicopter ... once a symbol of the wild, these wolves have come to illustrate the demise of wilderness in this Human Age. ... And yet, the howl of an unregistered wolf—half of a rogue pair—splits the night. If you know where to look, you'll...

The Cache Clean Air Consortium, in co-sponsorship with Breathe Utah, is a workshop that facilitates community partnerships that result in actionable strategies to improve air quality in the Cache Valley region of northern Utah.

Hyperpartisanship is as old as American democracy. But now, acrimony is not confined to a moment; it’s a permanent state of affairs and has seeped into every part of the political process. So say political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. When their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism” was published a fe...

Parenting techniques continue to fuel online debate: do we protect our children? Prepare them? Research suggests our communities are increasingly safer than ever before, but the average citizen assumes otherwise - how do we navigate ourselves through these colliding perspectives and realities? Furthermore, how can we both protect and prepare our children, and do we need a self-identifying label to...

Today's broadcast of "Access Utah" originally aired in 2011.

Dixie State University and the DOCUTAH International Documentary Film Festival offers three screenings of "Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot," the true story of the forgotten heroes in the fight for voting rights — the courageous students and teachers of Selma, Alabama, who stood up against injustice despite facing intimidation, arrests and violence. 2015 is the 50th anniversary of the passage of th...

It’s been several months since we got together as a community and compiled a UPR book list. Public radio listeners are famous as avid readers. We want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or on your device right now? Fellow listeners may not know about it and may love it.

Today's Broadcast of "Access Utah" is an encore presentation from 2012.

Today's broadcast of "Access Utah" is an encore presentation from April 2015.

“My whole childhood, I never had a bed.” That’s how Elva Trevino Hart opens her memoir “Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child.”

In his new book “Ways to the West” (Utah State University Press) Tim Sullivan embarks on a car-less road trip through the Intermountain West, exploring how the region is taking on what may be its greatest challenge: sustainable transportation. Combining personal travel narrative, historical research, and his professional expertise in urban planning, Sullivan takes a critical yet optimistic and oft...