EH Blog

We are so excited to welcome Alastair Lee Bitsóí as our Spring ‘22 Practitioner-in-Residence! Alastair is from the Navajo Nation community of Naschitti, below the Chooshgai Mountains on the New Mexico–Arizona state line. He is currently the Southern Utah reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. He has been an award-winning news reporter for the Navajo Times and communications director for the Indigenous-led land conservation nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah. His consulting business, Near the Water Communications and Media Group, trains media, nonprofits, businesses, and governments in cultural sensitivity.

Anne Whitehouse is a recent graduate of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program (December 2021). Last summer, Anne interned with Seven Canyons Trust, a local nonprofit dedicated to daylighting and restoring the impaired waterways of the Salt Lake Valley. Urban waterways was a theme of her thesis as well, which explored the relationships between women and urban waterways under colonial rule in Pak T’ae-won’s 1938 novel Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream.

LaUra (she/her), a 2012 Environmental Humanities graduate, is a truth-seeker, community-builder, cultural critic, and grief worker. She is also the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. Inspiration finds her in natural landscapes and honest, open-hearted dialogue. She is the founding director of the Good Grief Network and has been studying and cultivating personal and collective resilience strategies for nearly a decade. She is trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and is a Climate Reality Leadership Corps member & mentor.

Doug Sam is a second-year EH student and a Mellon Community Fellow. The Mellon Community Fellowship in the EH Program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fellows form reciprocal partnerships with a community organization and develop a project that addresses local environmental justice issues. Doug has partnered with the Summit Land Conservancy for his fellowship, merging both his interests in environmental education and Indigenous history. Summit Land Conservancy is a nonprofit dedicated to saving open spaces of Park City and the Wasatch Back.

Join the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program for a presentation from the Mellon Community Fellows on their work to further environmental justice. Doug Sam and Riley Sayers will discuss their local community partnerships and the ways they use humanities tools to further environmental justice. This fellowship and our program's efforts to further environmental justice is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.