Events

POSTPONED Please join us for a signing and book launch party for Penguin Sets Sail. Jessica Linn Evans is an author and illustrator who lives in Idaho with her husband, her four delightful children, a bunny, and seven chickens. Penguin Sets Sail is her first wordless picture book. She has also illustrated other books including Solar the Polar, Waiting Through Winter, and Little Mouse Finds a Friend. All her illustrations are rendered with traditional mediums: watercolor, graphite, and ink.

POSTPONED Please join us on Earth Day at 7pm for the book launch reading and talk with Adam Sowards, author of An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest.

"Adam Sowards picks up where John McPhee left off in Encounters with the Archdruid. An Open Pit Visible from the Moon offers an equally engaging and carefully researched account of the Kennecott Copper mining controversy in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Rather than simplifying the story as a victory of environmental interests over corporate profits, Sowards explains the disparate and sometimes surprising factors that kept Kennecott Copper from mining its claim. This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how wilderness politics and protection work."-- James R. Skillen, author of Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife 

Situated among the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, Miners Ridge contains vast quantities of copper. Kennecott Copper Corporation's plan to develop an open-pit mine there was, when announced in 1966, the first test of the mining provision of the Wilderness Act passed by Congress in 1964. The battle over the proposed "Open Pit, Big Enough to Be Seen from the Moon," as activists called it, drew the attention of both local and national conservationists, who vowed to stop the desecration of one of the West's most scenic places. Kennecott Copper had the full force of the law and mining industry behind it in asserting its extractive rights. Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service was determined to defend its authority to manage wilderness. 

An Open Pit Visible from the Moon tells the story of this historic struggle to define the contours of the Wilderness Act--its possibilities and limits. Combining rigorous analysis and deft storytelling, Adam M. Sowards re-creates the contest between Kennecott and its shareholders on one hand and activists on the other, intent on maintaining wilderness as a place immune to the calculus of profit. A host of actors cross these pages--from cabinet secretaries and a Supreme Court justice to local doctors and college students--all contributing to a drama that made Miners Ridge a cause célèbre for the nation's wilderness movement. As locals testified at public hearings and writers penned profiles in the nation's magazines and newspapers, the volatile political economy of copper proved equally influential in frustrating Kennecott's plans. 

No law or court ruling could keep Kennecott from mining copper, but the pit was never dug. Identifying the contingent factors and forces that converged and coalesced in this case, Sowards's narrative recalls a critical moment in the struggle over the nation's wild places, even as it puts the unpredictability of history on full display.

Adam M. Sowards is an environmental historian, writer, and professor at the University of Idaho. His work focuses on the environment, public lands, and democracy.