Meet the Speakers

Terry Tempest Williams

Occupation: Writer, environmental activist
Home: Castle Valley, Utah
Born: 1955
Speaking: 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 30 at Salt Palace Convention Center

Terry Tempest Williams grew up within sight of the Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City, Utah. She says simply, "I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture. I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, these ideas are then filtered through the prism of my culture and my culture is Mormon. The tenets of family and community which I see at the heart of that culture are then articulated through story."

Williams is perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, where she chronicles the epic rise of Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to be caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 60s, is now regarded as a classic in American nature writing, a testament to loss and the earth's healing grace.

Her most recent book, Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert, traces her lifelong love of and commitment to the desert, inspiring a soulful return to "wild mercy" and the spiritual and political commitment of preserving the fragile red rock wilderness of southern Utah.

Departing from the natural landscape, another recent work, Leap is an unexpected pilgrimage into the habitat of Hieronymus Bosch's medieval triptych masterpiece The Garden of Delights. With spiritual candor, psychological immediacy and emotional intensity, Williams uncovers deep connections between contemporary life and the world of this startling, five hundred-year-old painting depicting Paradise, Hell, and The Garden.

In 1991, Newsweek identified Williams as someone likely to make "a considerable impact on the political, economic, and environmental issues facing the western states this decade."

She has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society and was a member of the western team for the President's Council for Sustainable Development. She is currently on the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, The Nature Conservancy, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. She has testified before the United States Congress twice regarding women's health and the environmental links associated with cancer, and has been a strong advocate for America's Redrock Wilderness Act.

Formerly, naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History, Ms. Williams now lives in Castle Valley, Utah, with her husband Brooke Williams.

Grant Jones, FASLA

Occupation: Landscape Architect
Home: Seattle, Wash.
Born: 1938
Speaking: 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 30 at Salt Palace Convention Center

Grant Jones is the founding principal of Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects, Ltd. in Seattle. He has practiced ecological design for 30 years, pioneering in river planning, scenic highway design, zoo design, and landscape aesthetics.

Grant has recently worked on the Paris Pike Historic Highway in Kentucky, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, the Mountains-to-Sound Greenway across the Cascade Mountains in Washington, the Commons Park in Denver (with Civitas, Inc.), America?EUR??,,????'???s first wildlife highway, US Highway 93 through the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, and the Puget Sound Greenprint for the Trust for Public Land.

"I like to think of myself as a student of the time, searching in eddies, not swept along in the mainstream. This requires scholarship of a different kind because it cuts across the arts and sciences.

I am a poet who uses the voice inside me to be a better landscape architect and conservation planner. As a poet I can access the essence of a place in ways analytical techniques prevent. I have a passion for drawing out what is in the land itself...nature and people and the whole fabric of the working landscape in its day-to-day movements, residual memories, and the tastes and smells and textures of the moment. Writing poetry helps me go native.

Writing poetry tunes me into the life energy of a place, the aesthetics of a place. It?EUR??,,????'???s this whole pulsing animus of a place that produces its aesthetic beauty. Scenery is not trees, inanimate water, and rocks, with a quaint building in the distance.

The land is like a dear friend, a lover. It defines me because it created me. This discourse I can have with the land also continues to create me in each moment. Writing a poem opens doors for me. It helps me to get to know places and to fall in love with them, and to fall more deeply in love with those I hold close. I?EUR??,,????'???m in love with the land."

--Grant Jones, from ?EUR??,,????'??The Fullness?EUR??,,????'?? (2000).

Steve Uzzell

Occupation: Photographer
Home: Reston, Va.
Born: 1947
Speaking: 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 31 at Salt Palace Convention Center

Steve Uzzell is an advertising and corporate photographer. He started in the photography business as an assistant to the editor of National Geographic and a member of their photographic staff. He has published two books of his own photography, Maryland and The View from Sterling Bluff.

Uzzell?EUR??,,????'???s work has been featured in such publications as Newsweek, Time, The Smithsonian and U.S. News and World Report, and his cinematography has aired on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. He spends six months of the year traveling throughout the world for his clients; the remainder is spent teaching and delivering his presentation Open Roads Open Minds, an exploration of creative problem solving.

Steve's activity-filled assignment calendar is the result of his uncanny eye, detailed preparation and his ability to exceed expectations. Uzzell could have chosen to design bridges, but his inner voice sent him down a more interesting path of great beauty, and now has led him to share not only his wonderful photography, but his insights into the creative process itself.

Using his own wonderful photographs as illustrations of his metaphor about possibility and creativity, Uzzell inspires audiences to take advantage of his experience and his astounding photographic portfolio to make any venture an adventure. Steve's approach to his photographic work serves as a blueprint for us to clearly see that solutions are sometimes found in very unexpected places.

In any project he undertakes, Uzzell lays the foundation for magic to happen, turning his focused attention to each client individually. "Chance favors the prepared mind," said Louis Pasteur. Our eyes see only what our mind is prepared to comprehend.

As Uzzell stresses, the open road never fails to open your mind, and once your mind is open, the power of your imagination is released.

Peter E. Walker, FASLA

Occupation: Landscape Architect
Home: San Francisco, Calif.
Born: 1933
Speaking: 3 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 1 at Salt Palace Convention Center

Peter Walker gained national attention this year for his work (with New York architect Peter Arad) on the World Trade Center site memorial in New York City.

In February, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote about the pair?EUR??,,????'???s collaboration. ?EUR??,,????'??Walker is an aesthetic minimalist, which is unusual among landscape designers,?EUR??,,????'?? Goldberger wrote. ?EUR??,,????'??It made him an ideal partner, not to say mentor, for Arad in the continuing evolution of the design.?EUR??,,????'??

Peter Walker is a landscape architect with 40 years of experience in practice and teaching. The scope of his concerns is expansive ?EUR??,,????'??+ from the design of small gardens to the planning of cities ?EUR??,,????'??+ with a particular emphasis given to the scale of projects for corporate headquarters, plazas, academic campuses and urban renewal. Exploring the relationship among art, culture, and context, Peter Walker reforms the landscape ?EUR??,,????'??+ whether urban or natural?EUR??,,????'??+and challenges traditional concepts of design.

Co-founder of the firm Sasaki, Walker and Associates (established in 1957), Peter Walker opened its west coast office, which became The S.W.A. Group in 1975. As Principal, Consulting Principal, and Chairman of the Board, he helped to shape The S.W.A. Group as a multi-disciplinary office with an international reputation for excellence in environmental design. In 1983, he formed Peter Walker and Partners.

Peter Walker has served as consultant and advisor to numerous public agencies and institutions: Sydney 2000 Olympic Coordination Authority, the Redevelopment Agency of San Francisco, the Port Authority of San Diego, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Washington and the American Academy in Rome. He played an essential role in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, as both the chairman of the Landscape Architecture Department and the acting director of the Urban Design Program. He headed the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley from fall 1997 through summer 1999. Peter Walker is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and of the Institute for Urban Design, and was granted the American Institute of Architects?EUR??,,????'??? Honor Award.

Peter Walker and his partners continually test ideas on urbanism and environmental design in varied geographical and cultural contexts. Projects include Saitama Plaza and Harima Town Park in Japan, Sony Center and D.I.F.A. in Berlin, the headquarters for Novartis Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and Millennium Park for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Advocating a landscape that responds to, as well as influences, its environment, Peter Walker has collaborated with architects of such stature as I. M. Pei, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster, Yoshio Taniguchi, Ricardo Legorreta and Helmut Jahn.

Peter Walker has co-authored Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape. Over the past five years, his work has been the subject of, and was included in, several exhibitions in San Francisco, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and in Tokyo. His commitment to education remains constant, with a continuing involvement in teaching and publishing. Peter Walker created Spacemaker Press to further the debate among designers, critics and historians, as well as those concerned with the shaping of the landscape.