An April Alum

This month is Earth month in the library. We have looked at comments by a former commencement speaker, Bill McKibben, and his recent Step It Up Day, a national day united around a common call to action: "Step It Up Congress: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." We have a display on Earth Day which centers on what we all can do with recycling. And, it came to our attention that we had an alum who was active in The Wilderness Society. Ben Beach is senior editor at The Wilderness Society whose mission is “Deliver to future generations an unspoiled legacy of wild places, with all the precious values they hold: Biological diversity; clean air and water; towering forests, rushing rivers, and sage-sweet, silent deserts.” We asked Ben to share with us his path from the Academy to his current position, why he is passionate about what he does, and a list of his favorite books. He did more and sent us a beautiful Wilderness Society poster for the library and a stack of magazines for our users to take.
Stop by and meet Ben in our display. Discover that he’s run The Boston Marathon since his freshman year of college and ran his 40th this year! Grab a magazine or check out one of his favorite reads which include: This House of Sky by Ivan Doig: A wonderfully written memoir about growing up on Montana sheep farms in the 1940s and 1950s, John Adams by David McCullough: A long, but superb, biography of our second president. (One minor, but striking, fact in this book: Adams did not learn that his son had been elected president until five days later,) or The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan: An account of the horrible conditions that faced those who lived through the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.