Book Talk: Jordan Fisher Smith, author of "Engineering Eden"

Jordan Fisher Smith will read from and discuss his new book Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight Over Controlling Nature at a lunchtime colloquium sponsored by the Carnegie Department of Global Ecology.

 In June of 1972, 25-year-old Harry Eugene Walker left his family’s Alabama dairy farm to see America.  Sixteen days later he arrived at the world’s first and oldest national park, Yellowstone, on its hundredth birthday.  In the middle of the festivities, Harry was dragged away, killed, and partly eaten by a grizzly bear.  His parents, simple country people who had never so much as contested a traffic ticket, sued the Department of the Interior for mismanaging the Yellowstone grizzlies. When the case went to court in 1975, two of the greatest wildlife biologists of the twentieth century—one, the eldest son of Aldo Leopold; the other, the inventor of the radio collar—testified against each other in a case that became a referendum on how we manage wild places that still reverberates today.  “Timely and thoughtful… Smith’s book will draw you in with his passion, thoughtfulness and first-rate storytelling,” says the Wall Street Journal of Engineering Eden.

Jordan Fisher Smith spent 21 years as a park and wilderness ranger. He is the author of the nonfiction memoir Nature Noir, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books pick, a Wall Street Journal summer reading selection, and an Audubon Magazine Editor’s Choice. Smith has written for New Yorker, TIME.com, Men’s Journal, and Discover. He is a principal cast member and narrator of the documentary film about Lyme disease, “Under Our Skin,” which was shortlisted for the 2010 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Newsweek said of Smith: “He writes about the natural world with more grace than anyone since Edward Abbey.” He lives in the Sierra Nevada.