Bioneers 2004 Archives
Ten days ago, author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, The Open Space of Democracy), a writer I’ve always found more thoughtful and gentle than threatening, was disinvited to speak at Florida Gulf Coast University on the grounds that she'd be too critical of the Bush administration's environmental policies. The president of the university, a Bush donor named William Merwin (“not to be confused with the poet,” said Tempest Williams), said she was a threat to the pre-election balance of information at institutions of higher learning.
This morning she told this story:
Merwin explained it like this: “If a hurricane threatens my university, I’m going to shut it down.”
And I said, “What if it’s only a tempest?”
Tempest Williams’ father, a Utah Republican pipeline contractor with a shrine to Ronald Reagan in his home, offered to go back to the school with his daughter. “Tell them you’re bringing a Republican who’s voting for Bush,” he told her.
A few days later, the phone at her father’s home was ringing off the hook. “People are outraged,” he said.
“Why?” said Tempest Williams. “About me?”
“No,” he said. “Because I’m voting for Bush.”
“Are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
[Big applause]
(I think I got that sort of right.)
Terry Tempest Williams is a “downwinder”: She grew up in southern Utah and has lost many people in her family to cancer.
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