There is a movement across the nation that is connecting people to nature, something we here at Severson Dells Nature Center have been doing for over 30 years. We are thankful to be able to honor the memory of Dr. Alan Hutchcroft in providing a very special night to you. Two shining stars in the field of nature education who have dedicated a greater part of their lives involved with that important link will be presenting at Severson Dells. After the presentation we have asked Scott and Bob to field questions together on the issue of the importance of connecting people to nature. It promises to be a night long remembered.

First Boy in the Woods

Scott Russell Sanders
Friday, June 27, 6:30 pm

Scott Sanders will read from and talk about a publication to be released in spring 2009. It will be a new short story about a young man whose fascination with nature leads him away from his city existence into the wilds of Vermont (and into the arms of a like-minded young woman.) This story will appear in The Kenyon Review next year. Scott has visited Severson Dells before and is one of those special people that you could listen to speak forever. You will not want to miss him.

Born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, Scott Russell Sanders studied in Rhode Island and Cambridge, England, before going on to become a Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University. Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put (Beacon, 1993), Writing from the Center (Indiana U.P., 1995), and Hunting for Hope (Beacon, 1998). His latest book, a memoir called A Private History of Awe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), was nominated by the publisher for a Pulitzer Prize. His new collection of essays, A Conservationist Manifesto, will be published next spring. His writing has won the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.

Into the Field: Deep Immersion vs. the Extinction of Experience

Robert Michael Pyle
Friday, June 27
Beginning after a short intermission following Scott Russell Sanderspyle3.jpg

In this talk and associated walks (on Saturday), Bob Pyle will show and tell how intimate involvement with nature on a day-to-day basis is the only true antidote to alienation and the cycle of loss he has called “the extinction of experience,” with all its galeful consequences. Now halfway through his historic First Butterfly Big Year, a continent-wide personal foray in the company of butterflies, he will share adventures from the road, impressions of the State of the Habitat, and the response of butterflies to a warming earth.

Pyle’s B.S. in Nature Perception and Protection (1969) and M.S. in Nature Interpretation (1973) from the University of Washington were followed in 1976 by a Ph.D. from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In 1971, during a Fulbright Fellowship at the Monks Wood Experimental Station in England, Pyle founded the Xerces Society for invertebrate conservation, and later chaired its Monarch Project.

Pyle has published hundreds of papers, essays, stories, and poems, in many journals. He contributes an essay “the tangled bank” in every issue of Orion Afield. He has written ten books, including Wintergreen, winner of the 1987 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, as well as the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies and the Handbook for Butterfly Watchers. His latest book Sky Time in Gray’s River (Houghton Mifflin) received the first annual Orion Reader’s Choice Award.

And what has Bob been up to lately you ask?

Take a butterfly expert, a 1982 Honda named Powdermilk with an odometer reading 350,000 miles and a quest to count as many of the 800 butterfly species in the U.S. and Canada and you’ve got Robert Michael Pyle’s Butterfly Big Year. He’s planning to write a book on his adventures, entitled: “Swallowtail Seasons: The First Butterfly Big Year.”

Here’s Pyle’s description of the adventure: “My objective, as you know, is to encounter as many of the 800 species of North American butterflies north of Mexico (based on the new Pelham Catalog) as I possibly can in the year 2008. I don’t intend to merely tick them off, but to indulge in deep and revealing encounters with the butterflies, their habitats, and the landscapes and people and stories that make up their whole continental context. Of course I’ll be looking at the state of habitats and how traditional ranges are responding to climate change. It is these stories and perceptions and findings that will make up the pith of Swallowtail Seasons.”

You can keep track of Pyle’s travels here:
http://www.xerces.org/Butterfly_Conservation/butterflyathon.html#notes
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/butterfly/