Terry Tempest Williams
Transforming the uncertainty of a changing climate into community-driven action.
Terry Tempest Williams finds inspiration for her impassioned, lyrical writing all around her—in the landscapes and people of the American West (Erosion–Essays of Undoing), in the epic history of her family (Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place), and as a “barefoot artist” in Rwanda (Finding Beauty in a Broken World).
An award-winning practitioner of creative nonfiction, she has written more than 20 books, each exploring our relationship to nature and culture. As a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, she is exploring the question, “What are the spiritual implications of climate change?” And at her home in Castle Valley, UT, she and her husband, Brooke Williams, are living these questions with their neighbors as they find themselves in the heart of extreme heat, drought, and flash floods.
In 2024, flash floods shocked the town of Castle Valley, in particular, and Grand County, UT. Following last summer’s five flash floods that transformed where they live, the community around Placer Creek, a tributary of the Colorado River, came together in a shared resolve to find solutions for how they can continue to live in this dynamic, erosional landscape. They are one community among many in the American Southwest that is experiencing climate collapse in what scientists have called a “megadrought” not seen in 2,500 years, where flooding is occurring with greater frequency and greater intensity.
What does it mean to live in a desert community with this kind of uncertainty as interdependent neighbors? How can what binds us together become more powerful than what tears us apart in a divided America? Tempest Williams is interested in reimagining with her neighbors, in real time and place, ways to adapt to a landscape reshaped by climate change—with the possibility of creating a template for how we find refuge in change with other communities, in the Desert West and beyond.