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Writer, renegade naturalist, and adventurer Doug Peacock has spent the past forty years wandering the earth’s wildest places, studying grizzly bears, and advocating for the preservation of wilderness. But the “beast of our time,” says Peacock, “is climate change.” His March 6th lecture, “The Greatest Adventure: A Survivor’s Guide to a Melting Century,” is the 2011-12 Clark Lecture. In his talk, Peacock will “spin an adventure tale rooted in paleontology and archeology” that has serious implications for the future of humans and other creatures who inhabit this planet. On this journey, Peacock will explore the relationship between global warming and the importance of wilderness, and will offer “lessons of courage and caution for modern people.”
Our climate has been relatively stable for the past 12,000 years, but that era is over. We are now facing a future that will be unsettled, probably fiery, and likely terrifying. Peacock argues that the earliest inhabitants of North America also faced a very dangerous, unsettled, and largely uninhabited landscape, prowled by huge cats and gigantic bears. He will compare the global changes that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene era with what is happening in today’s world. Are there valuable parallels between the world of the First Americans and today? This is the territory Peacock hopes to explore in his talk.
A Vietnam veteran, former Green Beret medic, and close friend of Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock was the real-life model for Abbey’s character George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Peacock was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2011 Lannan Fellow.
He is the author of Grizzly Years; Baja; and Walking it Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness. His latest book, co-written with his wife Andrea Peacock, is The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears. He is currently working on a book about archeology, climate change, and the peopling of North America.
The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. in 182 Lillis Hall, and is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a book sale and signing. It can be viewed as live-streaming video. For more information, call (541) 346-3934. |
