Dialogue Summer 2011 issue has some WIZards

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.   Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.

Table of contents:

Page      Author      Title
Mary Toscano      Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v      Edwin Firmage, Jr.      Letters
1      Steven L. Peck      Why Nature Matters: A Special Issue of Dialogue on Mormonism and the Environment
6      George B. Handley      Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change
36      Craig D. Galli      Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
57      Bryan V. Wallis      Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas: Revelatory Religion and the Environment
67      Jason M. Brown      Whither Environmental Theology
87      Bart H. Welling      “The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal
118      Mary Toscano      A Perch, A Foothold, A Float
119      Patricia Gunter Karamesines      Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers
134      Adam S. Miller      Recompense
143      Ron Madson      Grandpa’s Hat
148      Sarah Dunster      Gaius
150      Harlow Soderborg Clark      Easter Sermons
152      Jon Ogden      Seasonal Ritual
153      Jonathon Penny      Winterscape: Prairie
154      Karen Kelsay      Mother Willow
155      Sandra Skouson      Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother
156      Mary Toscano      The Tightrope Walker
157      Hugo Olaiz      The Birth of Tragedy
161      David G. Pace      American Trinity
177      Benjamin E. Park      Image and Reality in the Utah Zion
180      Polly Aird      Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder
190      Rob Fergus      Scry Me a River
196      Mary Toscano      Wherever He May Go
197      Peter L. McMurray      This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Can’t wait to get my copy.     I’m very happy to see so many WIZards’ work appearing in the issue, including poems from WIZ’s 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff.

Only complaint: The cover girl or boy polar bear is cute, but I would have put hummingbirds up front.

Just sayin’.

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Excerpt from Home Waters by George Handley

The twentieth century has gone down in history for a number of ignominious as well as heroic events, but certainly one of its more troubling legacies is its treatment of rivers. As agriculture gave way to industry and massive development of cities, water was victim to an increasingly private and individualistic conceptualization of property. Consequently, rivers suffered greater transformation than in the previous ten thousand years. They were straightened, diked, and dammed, and where I live water was transported from less populous areas and fed into the Provo, all to provide more space for homes, more safety from floods to homeowners, and reservoirs to ensure the perpetuity of modernization. And as Donald Worster reminds us, the Mormons played no small role in this harnessing of water’s wild and unpredictable ways, seeing dams and dikes as the way of the Lord. Several small hydroelectric dams were built on the Provo early in the century, and then two major dams were built, one in the 1940s and the other in the 1990s.

Within a century of the arrival of the white man, 95 percent of the native species in the river and of Utah Lake went extinct, this despite the fact that it had been the meat of the native fish of the river and lake that provided for humans for thousands of years and saved the lives of the pioneers in those early, hunger-ridden years of settlement. But this is only the most overt and measurable of consequences. Aquatic species worldwide are going extinct at much faster rates than terrestrials. When the fish go, that means the invertebrates, zooplankton, plants, and whole swaths of life go, too.