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9th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental ImaginationTHE FUTURE OF WATER: A series of invited lectures, creative readings, interdisciplinary panel discussions, book signings, receptions, and a documentary film about the secret life and turbulent future of the world’s fresh and salt water supplies. Spring Semester, 2013.
T H E F U T U R E O F W A T E RSpring 2013 Iowa State University
All Events are Free & Open to the Public (Click here to download pdf of full symposium brochure.)
Monday, Feb. 25 — Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst
Memorial Union, Great Hall — 8:00 PM
“The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Rather than only three states of water—liquid, ice, and vapor—there is a fourth, ‘molecular water,’ fused into rock 400 miles deep in the Earth, and that’s where most of the planet’s water is found. Unlike most precious resources, water cannot be used up; it can always be made clean enough again to drink—indeed, water can be made so clean that it’s toxic. Water is the most vital substance in our lives but also more amazing and mysterious than we appreciate. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this surprising and mind-changing narrative, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, yet we take it completely for granted. But the era of easy water is over.” –amazon.com review
Tuesday, Feb. 26 — Moderated Conversation with Charles Fishman, Science Writing & the Environment
Memorial Union, Cardinal Room — 9:00 AM
Join Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, for an informal discussion about science writing and writing about the environment. Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative and magazine journalist who has spent the last twenty years trying to get inside, understand and explain important organizations, from NASA to Tupperware to Wal-Mart. Since 1996 he has been a senior writer at Fast Company magazine. He is also the author of The Walmart Effect. He will discuss the process of researching and writing The Big Thirst. Melissa Lamberton will moderate the discussion. She is a candidate in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and a communications graduate research assistant at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Thursday, March 28 — Environmental Field Experience Presentations
Octagon Center for the Arts, Community Gallery, 427 Douglas Avenue, Ames, IA — 7:00 PMSarah Burke — Molly Graham — Lydia Melby — Andrew Payton — Nate Pillman — Abigail Stonner — Megan White Graduate students from the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment will present their research and creative work springing from the environmental field experiences they have completed while in the program. The field experiences include everything from helping scientists track the effect of wind turbines on wildlife, to assisting the premier wolf biologist in the country, to studying food preservation on Onion Creek Farm, to working on a sheep farm in New Zealand, to studying the architecture of Virginia, to working at the Story County Animal Shelter, to working in an orchard in Greensboro, VT.
Friday, March 29 — Future of Water Symposium
Memorial Union, Pioneer Room — All Day
Poets Elizabeth Bradfield and Sherwin Bitsui will discuss the political implications as well as the ethics and responsibilities of exploration and resource management in a postcolonial world. Who wins, who loses, who profits? Moderator: Geetha Iyer was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, and moved to the United States to study biology. She has since become an MFA student at Iowa State University's Creative Writing & Environment program. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with a bent toward place-based and science writing. Her first publication is the recipient of a Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction.
Refreshments & Good Conversation
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Charles Fishman is the author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. Fishman’s previous book, the New York Times bestseller The Wal-Mart Effect, was the first to crack open Wal-Mart’s wall of secrecy, and has become the standard for understanding Wal-Mart’s impact on our economy and on how we live. The Economist named it a “book of the year.” Fishman is a former metro and national reporter for the Washington Post, and was a reporter and editor at the Orlando Sentinel and the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC. Fishman has won numerous awards, including three times receiving UCLA’s Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious award in business journalism. Fishman grew up in Miami, Florida and attended Harvard University.
Melissa Lamberton is a poet, journalist and naturalist from
Tucson, Arizona. Her writing focuses primarily on western water issues,
including the legal rights of rivers. She is interested in translating
the complex scientific language of a changing natural world into
compelling prose for the public. She has worked as a writer for The
Water Resources Research Center and The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory,
both in Arizona. Lamberton is a candidate in the MFA Program in Creative
Writing and Environment and a communications graduate research
assistant at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Can you light your water on fire? The largest domestic natural gas
drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The
Halliburton-developed drilling technology of "fracking" or hydraulic
fracturing has unlocked a "Saudia Arabia of natural gas" just beneath
us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his
land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a
trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby
Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their
drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and
astonishing revelations of a new country called Gasland. Part verite
travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown,
part showdown.
Elizabeth Bradfield's award-winning poetry collection, Approaching Ice, portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures—Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.
Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist. She is the author of two
poetry collections: Interpretive Work and Approaching Ice, the second
of which is a poetic investigation of polar exploration and was a
finalist for the Laughlin Award from the Academy
of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly,
Poetry, Orion, The Believer and many anthologies. As a naturalist,
Bradfield considers herself an "aspiring generalist." She works on
expedition ships and tries to help deepen people’s experience
of place by both in-field interpretation and formal presentations. At
home, on Cape Cod, she does field research on marine mammals. Bradfield
is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press (
Join us for a reading of the "Home Voices" Award Winners from Flyway: A Journal of Writing & Environment. The winning pieces were selected by contest judge, Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter. 
Sherwin Bitsui's second book of poems, Flood Song,
interweaves allusions to the Native American myths and customs Bitsui
was raised with and searing, felt observations of contemporary urban
life. Bitsui floods his work with streams of observations of the real
and the imagined, through descriptions of the seen and surreal metaphor.Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood
Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds,
bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new
generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the
same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song
is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly
imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song
and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and
I "bite my eyes shut between these songs.”
Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two books of poetry, Shapeshift and Flood Song,
a recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award.
Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, he is
Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani
(Many Goats Clan). His work explores the tensions between the worlds of
nature and man as well as the challenge Native Americans face in
reconciling an inherited history of lore and spirit with a postmodern
civilization. Bitsui's many honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation
Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts
Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award.
Deep Blue Home is a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current, the watery force connected to the earth’s climate control and so to the eventual fate of the human race. Whitty’s thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of “extremophile” life forms to the strategies of nesting seabirds to the ecology of “whale falls” (what happens upon the death of a behemoth). No stranger to extreme adventure, Whitty travels the oceanside and underwater world from the Sea of Cortez to Newfoundland to the Galapagos to Antarctica. This book provides extraordinary armchair entree to gripping adventure, cutting-edge science, and an intimate understanding of our deep blue home.