Terry Tempest Williams

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As she continues writing (Williams' latest book, An Unspoken Hunger(1994), combines family portraits with essays on other female writers and visionaries who have loved the wild), she also fights cancers like clear-cutting and nuclear testing with the Wilderness Society--and with the Women, Health, and Environment Network, whose insistence that environmental issues, health questions, and women's concerns be addressed together resonates with Williams' sense of the unity of her indignation. 'I've watched every woman in my family die from being `downwinders,' victims of atomic tests. There is no separation whatever between me as a writer, an activist, and a Mormon woman.'

In fact, her religion's powerful, grateful love of place and its refusal to separate the spiritual and the secular are living traditions for this sixth-generation Mormon wife and mother; yet her engagement with her culture implies both love and struggle.

'Mormon culture is the force I write toward and against,' she says. I try to do what I think we all need to do to bring about change--to push the boundaries of what's acceptable. At the same time, the deep roots I have enable me to take risks. If you know where you are, you know who you are.'

And the taking of risks is, ultimately, the wild heart of Terry Tempest Williams' work. 'What are we afraid of that makes us accept so much that is intolerable?' she asks. 'We're afraid of intimacy, of wildness, of love; afraid of the very things we desire, because if we acknowledged them we would have to acknowledge the possibility of losing them.

'If we fail in this century, it won't be because of arrogance, it'll be because of fear.'

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