Access Utah

The producers of the new documentary film "The True Cost" note that there has been a 500% increase in clothing consumption in the past two decades, and that the U.S. has gone from producing more than 90% of its clothing in the 1960s to just three percent today. They say that the price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically.

Welcome to Access Utah. Small farmers are increasingly women these days. They are currently raking in roughly 13 billion dollars in produce every year. Today on the program, Sheri Quinn talks to Audrey Levatino, a female farmer, who left her teaching job to start a small sustainable farm selling cut flowers, pretty much all by herself. She is the author of "Woman Powered Farm."

We'll dive into some great Mariachi music and learn its history on Thursday's AU. We'll talk about how Mariachi music conveys Mexican culture, in Mexico and around the world, and we'll hear music performed by Lila Downs, Selena, and Vicente and Alejandro Fernandez, among others.

Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity: It's what children feel at summer camp. But in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back.

A joint initiative of Utah State University and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress will conduct a field-school project, beginning next week, for a field project called Voices: Refugees in Cache Valley. Designed to collect the stories and life experiences of refugees, the project will seek voices from Karen, Burmese, Eritrean, and other refugee communities in Cache Valley, Utah. We'll talk about the project and hear stories of refugees who've settled in Utah on Tuesday's Access Utah.

What does it mean to feel? The study of emotions has emerged as a central topic in the new discipline of affective neuroscience. In their new book, "The Feeling Brain," Elizabeth Johnston and Leah Olson trace how work in this rapidly expanding field speaks to fundamental questions: What is the function of emotions? What is the role of the body in emotions? What are "feelings," and how do they relate to emotions? Why are emotions so difficult to control? Is there an emotional brain?

Before launching her popular blog, "One Good Thing by Jillee," Heber City resident Jill Nystul was a newscaster battling a long list of demons. Suffering from postpartum anxiety and struggling to care for her four children, including a young son with celiac disease and diabetes, Nystul turned to food and alcohol for comfort. Her alcohol consumption eventually spiraled into an addiction that nearly cost her her family. Finally, after a yearlong marital separation and a hard look at herself in rehab, she realized that she needed to turn her life around. She began simply: blogging about one good thing each day.

In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great enticed German farmers to settle in Russia. The German communities remained distinct from the Russians linguistically and culturally. Julie Mangano is descended from such German settlers in Russia, as is the modern-day protagonist, Linden St. Clair, of her new novel “Braha.” The contemporary side of the novel revolves around Linden trying to uncover the truth behind the death of her beloved grandfather, Franklin, a wealthy rancher in rural Somerville, California. The second story comes from the memoirs of Linden’s great-great grandmother, Leena Lagerlöf, née Weiss, an ethnic German born in Russia, who fled in the last days of the czars. Both tales speak of lost loves and of truths dangerous and hidden.

Recently, tens of thousands of workers protested across the U.S. demanding a $15.00 per hour national minimum wage. Many say that even working full time or more they can't provide for their families. We'll examine income inequality on Tuesday's AU.

UPR listeners are curious about everything. We're always wanting to learn something fascinating. That's why we're avid readers. Periodically we come together on Access Utah to build a UPR Book List, and we're going to do it again on Monday. So we're asking: What are you reading? We're looking for everything from fiction, non-fiction, and classic literature to young adult and children's books. It might even be a textbook or manual that you can recommend. You can email your list to us right now at upraccess@gmail.com.

After nine years of keeping his prostate cancer at bay, the drugs were no longer working. The doctors told him his time was nearly up. So Jeff Metcalf dove deep into writing, tasking himself with writing one essay each week for a year. His book "Requiem for the Living" features the best of the resulting fifty-two essays by an author who continues to defy his medical prognosis. The essays form a memoir of sorts, recounting good times and critical moments from Metcalf's life. He doesn't describe a life defined by cancer but writes to discover what his life has been, who he has become, and what he has learned along the way.

It's an Earth Day tradition on Access Utah: we invite Utah writers to reflect on the environment. This year, Stephen Trimble, whose books include "Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America," says he's been thinking about climate change and the moral responsibility of the writer to speak up for our relationship with each other and with the earth.

Speaking to Neural magazine, artist Paul Vanouse said "I think in the next couple years there will be lots more scientific research that undermines DNA determinism. For instance, theorist Hanna Landecker...describe[s] varied large-scale "Relational Biology" research projects that examine things such as epigenetics, stem-cell differentiation, bidirectional signaling, etc. - things that I think may dethrone the reductive idea that DNA is the dictator of all things and may loosen the metaphor of life as code." Paul Vanouse is visiting USU as a part of the ARTsySTEM project. Tuesday on Access Utah we'll discuss Race and DNA, the CSI Effect, the Human Genome Project, and related topics.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, in his book “All The Wild That Remains,” nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these remarkable men from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, interweaving their stories and asking how they speak to the issues that confront the West today.

A bookseller in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, Hubert Howe Bancroft rose to define the early history of California and the West. Creating what he called a “history factory,” he assembled a vast library of over sixty thousand books, maps, letters, and documents. In 1890 he published an eight-hundred-page autobiography, titled "Literary Industries." Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to his great great granddaugher Kim Bancroft. She edited all 800 pages in the modern abridged edition of "Literary Industries: Chasing the Vanishing West."

Should Spanking Children Be Forbidden in the U.S.? Renowned criminologist Christian Pfeiffer from University of Hannover, Germany will present the European experience on Thursday, as a part of the USU Provost's Series on Instructional Excellence, and will join us for Thursday's AU.Dr. Pfeiffer's research interests include the role of religion and child rearing practices in the production of violence; the role of media in the lives of children and in the perception of crime and criminal policy; media consumption and violence; the implications of corporal punishment in politics; and extrajudicial dispute resolution.

In her song "Flawless," the singer Beyonce samples Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are." On Wednesday's AU we'll ask: Can the message of female empowerment co-exist with a sexualized image? Do advertising messages of companies like Carl's Jr. and Sports Illustrated promote the objectification of women? If so, how should those messages be corrected? How should we frame the topic of sex in the media, in the classroom, in the family, in society?

Ben Jones, is a single, 38-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his small trucking company. Ben's route takes him back and forth across one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert where he meets a mysterious cellist and the embittered owner of a small diner. That's the plot, in brief, of James Anderson's debut novel, "The Never-Open Desert Diner."

In 2014 the citizens of Idaho and Montana celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act – the law that secured protection for eight million acres of wild forests and mountains in these two states. In his new book (from University of Utah Press) “Where Roads Will Never Reach” environmental historian Frederick Swanson tells the story of how, decades before the Wilderness Act, ordinary citizens halted the federal government’s resource development juggernaut of the 1950s and 1960s, safeguarding some of the last strongholds of grizzly bear, mountain goat, elk, trout, salmon and steelhead. Swanson says that from Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return to Montana's Scapegoat and Great Bear, the wilderness areas of the Northern Rockies serve as a record of lasting public concern and as a model for citizens working to protect today's threatened landscapes.

What happens to a Mormon family in California when their teenage son tells them he's gay? How does the family navigate questions of faith and acceptance? The film "Families Are Forever" produced by the Family Acceptance Project and screened recently at Utah State University, tells the story of Tom and Wendy Montgomery and their five children, focusing on their son, Jordan. Participating in USU's Research Week, Wendy Montgomery joined Dr. Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University to discuss the Family Acceptance Project - a research, intervention, education and policy project founded by Dr. Ryan to help diverse families support their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children. The Family Acceptance Project seeks to prevent health risks like suicide and homelessness and to promote well-being in the context of families, cultures and faith communities.