Terry Tempest Williams

“Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.”

- Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Writer, author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams is not one to sit quietly by. In addition to writing about the issues that she cares so deeply about, Tempest Williams is also an activist. She has testified before Congress on women's health issues; been arrested and jailed for civil disobedience; she has been a guest at the White House; and worked as a barefoot artist, one of a group of artists invited to Rwanda to create a memorial to that country’s genocide. For Tempest Williams environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice.

This past February she joined hundreds of others in Salt Lake City in support of climate activist Tim DeChristopher. In early March 2011 DeChristopher was convicted of disrupting a federal oil and gas lease auction; in disrupting the auction – by winning the leases for 22,500 acres of public lands, but for which he had no intention of paying – he took the public lands out of the oil and gas play. Speaking at a gathering prior to the trial Tempest Williams said: “I love that Tim has shown us not only what is possible, but what is necessary.”

Tempest Williams is working on a new book about the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf, an early portion of which was featured in a recent cover story in Orion magazine. She last appeared at Mountainfilm in 2005.