Karmen

Winter birdwatching at Zion.

I write because I care. I grew up in southern Utah, in the desert, the redrock wilderness. I have lived most of my life away from that wild, natural environment, however. After moving to northern Utah to attend university I ended up staying and raising my family in Utah Valley, shadowed by the Wasatch mountains, still within an easy travel distance to the canyons that I, now single, and my children (now adults) love.

My formal education consists of: undergraduate degrees in Geography and History, with a Geology minor, master’s degree in Planning and Resource Management, Thesis: “Cannonville Utah: A geographic study of landscape and cultural change.” I taught Geography 101 (Physical Geography) for three years. All of this was at Brigham Young University where I currently am employed as Executive Secretary to the Dean of the College of Humanities and also the permanent member of the International Cinema Program committee. Where my formal education is based in the physical world, my life education has been largely the interface of the human experience with that physical world. I guess you could say that I am a humanist firmly grounded in the earth — but shouldn’t that describe all of us?

Trivia about me:

My passions: my family, the earth, geography, being outdoors, and trying to make the world better for all things, organic and inorganic.

My intense dislikes: Contention, Selfishness, Hypocrisy, Dishonesty, Unkindness, Incivility and Bad Things Done to This Beautiful World.

Things I like to do: travel, hike, read, write music, garden, watch hockey and international films.

I dislike: cilantro and peas, football, answering the telephone, leaving voicemail messages, cleaning up after my cats, not having good public transportation, going to the doctor/dentist.

I am: enjoying middle age, anxious about the state of the world, stressed about finances, joyful in my family and mostly at peace with my God.

My nature is quiet, passionate; my hair is red with a lot more white than I like; my eyes are hazel, often tired; my ears hear life, music; my senses feel warmth, comfort.

Finally:

I’m just someone who loves this beautiful earth. I feel that human beings may be writing their own final chapter by the general disregard for the natural systems and unwillingness to adapt to the conditions of our own creation. I believe that God created this world and everything in it, both living and nonliving. I also believe that he expects us to treat it well, to treat it with the same love and respect as He had for it during the creation. The commandment was not only to “multiply” but also to “replenish the earth” and I don’t believe that means only to fill it with more of ourselves. We can and must do better.