"Wallace Stegner and Western Lands" Honors Think Tank Class
This fall, Professor and Stegner Center Director Bob Keiter and Stegner Center Fellow Steve
Trimble will offer “Wallace Stegner and Western Lands,” an Honors College think tank class.
The class is part of the Stegner Center’s yearlong celebration to honor the centennial of Wallace
Stegner’s birth, which will be commemorated on February 18, 2009.
“This class will support our goal to build on Stegner's knowledge and insights to promote
thoughtful conservation and to establish ‘a society to match our scenery’ in the American West,”
said Professor Keiter. “As a law professor I will join with Steve Trimble, a writer and
photographer, to offer students an interdisciplinary approach to natural resource and
environmental matters.”
The class is a year-long undergraduate class that will include 12 students, each of whom will
apply and receive a $1,000 scholarship if selected. The class will spend the fall semester
absorbing background information by reading Stegner and other materials related to the West,
public lands and natural resources. Outside speakers will visit the class weekly to offer additional
insights, and the class will take a trip to the Moab area over fall break to meet with various groups
interested in the future of Canyonlands National Park.
Among others, reading materials will include Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John
Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West and The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Other
works include Wallace Stegner and Western Lands by Philip Fradkin, Cities in the Wilderness: A
New Vision of Land Use in America by Bruce Babbitt, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and
Endurance in the American Southwest by Charles Wilkinson, and Bargaining for Eden: The Fight
for the Last Open Spaces in America by Stephen Trimble.
The spring semester will be spent working on a class project related to an issue of current interest,
likely to involve public land management and potential boundary adjustments in the vicinity of
Canyonlands National Park in Southern Utah.