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Elizabeth Kolbert in Conversation With Bill McKibben

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? In Under a White Sky (Crown), Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the…

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Free

David Pogue in Conversation With Maxine Bleiweis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

You might not realize it, but we’re already living through the beginnings of climate chaos. In Arizona, laborers now start their day at 3 a.m. because it’s too hot to work past noon. Chinese investors are snapping up real estate in Canada. Millennials have evacuation plans. Moguls are building bunkers. Retirees in Miami are moving inland. In his new book, How to Prepare for Climate Change (Simon & Schuster), David Pogue — the five-time Emmy Award-winning technology and science correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning — offers sensible, deeply researched advice for how the rest of us should start to ready ourselves for the years ahead. Pogue walks readers through what to grow, what to eat, how to build, how to insure, where to invest, how…

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Free

PNCA Graduate Symposium 2021: Speculative Futures

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Hallie Ford School of Graduate studies (HFSGS) at PNCA is pleased to announce the 2021 Graduate Symposium theme: “Speculative Features.” This symposium will consider how contemporary artists render algorithmic harms visible and imagine speculative futures optimized for just outcomes. The two-day event will facilitate conversations on the ethical, environmental, political, social, and economic impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning for artists, designers, makers, writers, researchers, and cultural workers. Featuring the work of Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist who innovates with technology to make a positive impact on her community and the environment, and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, a scholar and curator exploring the intersections of algorithmic justice and visual art, Speculative Futures explores how artificial intelligence shapes political imaginaries of what is yet to come. SCHEDULE:…

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Free

Lyndsie Bourgon in Conversation With Ed Jahn

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves (Little, Brown Spark), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest, and a side effect of environmental preservation and protection that doesn't include communities…

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Free

Geo Eros: Metaphorizing Place in Nonfiction and Memoir — August 7th

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Geo Eros: Metaphorizing Place in Nonfiction and Memoir A Webinar with Lidia Yuknavitch In some ways, you are the places where you've been in your life. Since experience is difficult to carry around in our puny human bodies and often overwhelms us, metaphorizing—or creating core metaphors around place, objects, being and knowing—can open up new narrative strategies for storytelling. In this webinar we will identify and explore some of your core metaphors and test out some narrative strategies involving writing through place and environment, tracking your geographic origins and mapping out how place informs your life and narrative. Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the short story collection Verge (Riverhead Books), the novels The Book of Joan (Harper Books), The Small Backs of Children (Harper…

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$125

Nate Schweber, This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

In late 1940s America, few writers commanded attention like Bernard DeVoto. Alongside his brilliant wife and editor, Avis, DeVoto was a firebrand of American liberty, free speech, and perhaps our greatest national treasure: public lands. In This America of Ours, award-winning journalist Nate Schweber uncovers the forgotten story of a progressive alliance that altered the course of twentieth-century history and saved American wilderness—and our country’s most fundamental ideals—from ruin. Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, has this to say about the book: "Charming and absorbing, This America of Ours is the biography of a marriage between two lavishly talented characters, the witty and profane Avis DeVoto, who would become Julia Child's best friend and editor, and western…

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Free

Elizabeth Weinberg in Conversation With Chelsea Biondolillo

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

As wildfires char the American West, extreme weather transforms landscapes, glaciers retreat, and climate zones shift, we are undeniably experiencing the effects of the climate crisis in more and more destructive ways. Climate change is impacting every inhabited region of the world, but there is much we can still do. Unsettling (Broadleaf) explores human impacts on the environment through science, popular culture, personal narrative, and landscape. Using the stories of animals, landscapes, and people who have exhibited resilience in the face of persistent colonization across the North American continent, science writer Elizabeth Weinberg explores how climate change is a direct result of white supremacy, colonialism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Travel through the deep sea; along Louisiana's vanishing bayous; down the Colorado, Mississippi, and Potomac rivers; and…

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Free

Josephine Woolington & Ramon Shiloh in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In her debut work, Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press), Josephine Woolington turns back the clock to review the events that have challenged Pacific Northwest wildlife in an effort to provide a deeper sense of place. Only then can we imagine how these imperious effects might be overcome. Join Woolington as she sheds light on the diverse species whose populations are slowly declining from the lands, seas, and skies of the Pacific Northwest. Only by acknowledging this truth can we understand that our impact on the Earth is deeper and far more significant than we ever imagined. Through interviews with local educators, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and artists from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Haida Nation,…

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Free

Ruby McConnell and Char Miller

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for an evening with Ruby McConnell and Char Miller discussing their latest books, Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of Life and Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril. Ruby McConnell is a registered geologist and outdoor adventurer. She is a recipient of numerous honors, including the Literary Arts Oregon Literary Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Ground Truth is an extended eulogy to a rapidly changing land, population and society awakening to the realities of logging, climate change, land-use and pollution. The book illuminates the central role of landscapes in our ideas of home and self despite the growing disconnect between modern lifestyle and the environment. Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental…

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Free

John W. Reid

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska’s Bering seacoast to Canada’s Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost the entirety of South America’s bulge; the Congo, occupying parts of six nations in Africa’s wet equatorial middle; and the island forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California. These megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever Green (W. W. Norton). Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere — the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep…

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Free
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