BY KAREN BOSSICK
Historian Jared Farmer, a professor of history and award-winning author, will discuss his current work and its connection to a specific tree in the Wood River Valley at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 11, on the Community Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Lawn.
Farmer is staying at the historic Hemingway House as the second winner of The Jack Grove Residency, given in honor of the late Jack Grove, who loved reading and history. The first such residency hosted Cheryl Strayed, author of “Wild.”
Farmer is completing his manuscript for “Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times” while here.
He also is working on a digital humanities project that looks at Pennsylvania’s role in laying the groundwork for the climate crisis for a new work called “Petrosylvania.”
“The original oil boom in the world was here; the high-quality anthracite that was the best fuel source of the 19th century was almost exclusive in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a kind of planetary importance,” he said in an article for Penn Today.
Farmer, who grew up in Utah, earned an undergraduate degree from Utah State, a master’s from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
His books include “Glen Canyon Damned;” On Zion’s Mountain: Mormons, Indians and the American Landscape,” which won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and “Trees in Paradise: A California History,” which won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
He also has been awarded the Hiett Prize in the Humanities by the Dallas Institute; been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation and been awarded a Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin.
"Jared's work combines environmental realities with the humanities in a way many of us have never thought of," says Martha Williams, the Library's director of programs and education. "He embraces so many fields of thought, and enlightens with his approach to place-making and remaking, particularly of the American West. Jared challenges our benevolent notions of history and time, education and environmental ethics with narrative structures that lend us an understanding of these fields' enormity.”