Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of our Wild Ocean
Julia Whitty
Friday, 29 Mar 2013 at 7:00 pm – Pioneer Room, Memorial Union
Julia Whitty is the author of Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean. Her thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of ocean life, from the Sea of Cortez to Newfoundland to the Galapagos to Antarctica. Whitty's other books include The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific and A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga: Short Stories. Whitty is an environmental correspondent for Mother Jones magazine and a blogger at The Blue Marble and Deep Blue Home. Her more than seventy nature documentaries have aired on PBS, Nature, The Discovery Channel and National Geographic. The 9th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination: The Future of WaterFollowing her reading, Whitty will discuss the ethics of writing about threatened places and endangered species.
Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of our Wild Ocean was a Washington Post Best of Nonfiction Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Orion Award, the Commonwealth Club Award, and the Northern California Book Award.
Her previous book The Fragile Edge: Diving & Other Adventures in the South Pacific was the recipient of the John Burroughs Medal Award for outstanding natural history book, the PEN USA Award for creative nonfiction, the Kiriyama Prize for nonfiction, the 2008 Northern California Book Awards for creative nonfiction, and a finalist for the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Her first book, A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, was a winner of an O. Henry Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundations Writers Award, and the Bernice Slote Award for fiction, and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Whitty's fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Story, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Calyx, and elsewhere. Her journalism and short nonfiction have won a the Society of Environmental Journalists Award, a John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and have been short-listed three times for National Magazine Awards, as well as sharing a win in Mother Jones's National Magazine Award for general excellence. Her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science Writing 2011.
The Future of Water is a series of invited lectures, creative readings, interdisciplinary panel discussions and a documentary film about the secret life and turbulent future of the world’s fresh and salt water supplies.
Cosponsored By:
- Bioethics Program
- Center for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities
- College of Design
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology
- Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
- Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture
- History
- LAS Miller Lecture Fund
- Landscape Architecture
- Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
- MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
- Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
Stay for the entire event, including the brief question-and-answer session that follows the formal presentation. Most events run 75 minutes.
Sign-ins are after the event concludes. For lectures in the Memorial Union, go to the information desk in the Main Lounge. In other academic buildings, look for signage outside the auditorium.
Lecture Etiquette
- Stay for the entire lecture and the brief audience Q&A. If a student needs to leave early, he or she should sit near the back and exit discreetly.
- Do not bring food or uncovered drinks into the lecture.
- Check with Lectures staff before taking photographs or recording any portion of the event. There are often restrictions. Cell phones, tablets and laptops may be used to take notes or for class assignments.
- Keep questions or comments brief and concise to allow as many as possible.