Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and writer, a biologist by training with a literary

mind.

She comes from a long line of Mormons in Utah, and she takes the interior American West

as her center of political, spiritual, and creative gravity.

She sheds light on the West as a place where the divisions in America can be at their most

heated.

But to headlines of impasse and hostility, Terry Tempest Williams also has stories of citizen

land change.

She offers up practical virtues of neighborliness, the value of sacred rage, and seeing beauty

as an act of survival.

It's the small conversations that again, little large, that I think are so crucial, where

we really can not just offer our opinions, but really ideas.

I think that's what we're held before in, and I think that's where leadership lies.

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on being from APM American Public Media.

Terry Tempest Williams has been an activist for wilderness preservation all of her adult

life.

She's worked closely with the wilderness society, served on the president's council on sustainable

development, and helped lead an ongoing effort to save a type of prairie dog from extinction.

She's also the author of lyrical books that merge observation of the natural world with

social and spiritual reflection.

They have titles like The Open Space of Democracy, and Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I spoke with her in 2011, soon after the shooting of congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson,

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