Last Thursday night, URI welcomed acclaimed author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams. Her talk concluded the Center for Humanities’ year-long discussion, “Re-Envisioning Nature: An Environmental Humanities Lecture Series.” Williams has written prolifically on civil issues. Her most recent book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (2019), was available for purchase at the event and can be bought online here. 

In introducing Williams to URI, Professor Martha Elena Rojas described how “Terry Tempest Williams weaves together forms of trauma, of outrage, of grief and wonder, capturing a sense of place and of being as multivalent and vivid — even when in the process of erosion or erasure.” Williams’s writing is indeed energetic and illustrative, and when she read aloud for us her ‘obituary for the land,’ “A Burning Testament,” I found myself stirred from the inside and yet, on the outside, as still as a held breath on the edge my seat:

Her voice smooth yet sober, Williams spoke this to a crowd of URI faculty, students, and locals in the Hope Room of the High Wiggins Welcome Center. We could not have listened to Williams in a more fittingly named room, for however grave the topics Williams speaks on — climate change, forest fires, environmental racism, and so on — Williams herself is a voice of hope for the world and our place in it as humans. She vows in “A  Burning Testament,” “I will mark my heart with an ‘X’ made of ash that says, the power to restore life resides here.” Williams’s hope is not blind; it is tempered with an awareness of the times and empowered by an unassailable sense of responsibility to the land and to each other. 

We see this disciplined hopefulness both in her prolific writing and in her dialogue tonight with Professor Jeannette Riley, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In Williams’s essay, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Williams recounts the suffering of her family caused by the U.S. Government’s nuclear testing in Utah from 1951 to 1962, which led to high rates of breast cancer among the women. Williams details how she and others were arrested, during the 1980s, for marching on the Nevada Test Site. She explains, “A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their own.” [2] The government’s nuclear bombs were not damaging to the land alone, but fatal to its citizens — as all harm to the earth is harmful to the life it cradles.

Williams believes in changing the world by standing against injustice. She also believes in a quest seemingly less heroic, but in many ways more emotionally and mentally challenging: changing the world by standing with each other. In a country polarized by bipartisanism and prejudice, Williams stresses the importance of remembering that we are a community. During her and Professor Riley’s conversation, Williams referenced the flash flood that recently hit Rhode Island and recalled how she and her husband had to seek help from their mayor and neighbors, people who did not all agree with their politics but nevertheless recognized that cooperation was imperative to survival. She then alluded to a bullet-holed lawn sign she once passed that read, ‘If you are not my friend, you are my bulls-eye.’ Before soft (though likely not surprised) titters, Williams did not disparage the unknown owner of the sign, despite her disagreement with its hostile message, and instead wondered aloud how we might work around this widespread distrust. 

We in the audience were not let off this hook for this distrust, either. “We each have to take responsibility for finding ways to cross those boundaries,” Williams insisted. Later, she elaborates, “I am seeing fear with our students. I’m seeing fear as faculty. And I see a lot of performative language… How do we have conversations that are real, and where there’s enough trust developed that we can grapple together in creative ways about what we’re up against?” This question is one that academics, including those of us in the English graduate program, often wrestle with. How can we elevate our personal thoughts and theories to affect change on a broad scale? 

Perhaps one important avenue is locating this sense of community that Williams talks about. In the U.S., many of us face violence, prejudice, and the renunciation of our rights. We all are facing climate change and its devastating effects. There is strength in numbers, yet one of our greatest challenges at this point in American history is finding unity. Let us start with the community here, as a university and as a department. Let us share our ideas, expand our perspectives, and engage in fruitful debate. We will always have our differences, but as neighbors weathering the storm together, we must also have each other’s backs.

Williams’s biography and bibliography can be found on her blog, CoyoteClan.com. Watch the recording of the lecture via the URI Center for the Humanities YouTube channel.

Aries Cubilla is the editor of Essential Context. A Graduate Teaching Assistant and M.A. student at the University of Rhode Island, Aries devotes her days to instructing undergraduates in English and her evenings to the exploration of feminism, metafiction, and language in contemporary fiction.