Scott Russell Sanders, Renowned Conservationist Author, to Give Earth Day Lecture

Scott Russell SandersScott Russell Sanders, a respected author and environmental activist, will give a lecture entitled “Near and Distant Bears” at 7 p.m. April 22 in the Day Chapel at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. The lecture is part of The Georgia Review’s Earth Day celebration, co-sponsored by the Willson Center, the Botanical Garden, and the UGA Environmental Ethics Certificate Program.

The gravest threat to human well-being is not terrorism, economic depression, or disease, according to Sanders; it is the degradation, on a planetary scale, of the conditions necessary for life. What shift in outlook and values would be required if we are to halt that unraveling and begin the work of restoration?

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. The best of his essays from the past 30 years, plus nine new essays, are collected in Earth Works, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.