Between learning how to make mosaics in Italy, protecting prairie dogs in Utah and constructing a genocide memorial in Rwanda, Terry Tempest Williams said her journey to "Find Beauty in a Broken World" -- the title of her most recent book -- has led her to discover that even when the world seems to be in pieces, there is always hope to combine the fragments into a complete "mosaic," at her speech Thursday to a full audience in Cook Auditorium.
Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer, delivered this year's George Link Jr. Environmental Lecture, an annual event sponsored by the environmental studies department.
"Making a mosaic is taking what is broken and making it whole," Tempest Willliams said. She added that she has been using a mosaic metaphor since she saw the nation's -- and her own -- reaction to Sept. 11.
"[Brokenness] is an atmosphere that I've seen in my country," she said. "And so I entered the broken world."
Tempest Williams said she became angry at the government's response to the attacks, but later realized that "my own rhetoric had become as hollow and brittle as the one I was opposed to."
Mosaic became the image that she found herself repeatedly coming back to, she said, because it was the solution to the "quest for beauty" that was consuming her mind.
"The best writing comes out of the questions that keep us up at night," Tempest Williams said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
In Italy, she learned the art of mosaic making, and on her way home to Utah, Tempest Williams said she saw the horizon as "an ecological mosaic, broken and beautiful."
One piece of Utah's ecological mosaic is the prairie dog, Tempest Williams said, and its status as an endangered species may cause the rest of Utah's ecology to suffer. The disappearance of prairie dogs is causing desertification, because the prairie dogs were responsible for aerating the soil.
Without the prairie dogs, "there will be no one to cry for the rain," Tempest Williams said, quoting Navajo leaders who fought to save prairie dogs in the 1950s.
After working on the mosaics in Italy and with the prairie dogs in Utah, Tempest Williams said she could "never imagine" they would lead her to Rwanda.
"I think on some fundamental level I knew that my humanity depended on it," she said of going to Rwanda.
Tempest Williams read three passages from her book, describing the horrors she saw in Rwanda as she worked to create a memorial for the genocide.
"They needed a proper place to bury the bones of their children," she said.
While in Rwanda, her guide showed her the remains of the 10,000 people who were murdered in the guide's village 12 years ago.
"Each coffin contains many people -- whole families," Tempest Williams said, describing herself as a "genocide tourist" on a trip that left her "deflated."
Dartmouth has "challenged and shaped" Tempest Williams as a writer and thinker, she said, referring to her previous visits to the College. She has lectured here multiple times and was a Montgomery Fellow in February 2006.
"There's a real quality of self-reflection that I find unusual at Dartmouth," she said, adding that a conversation she had while a Fellow inspired one of her books. "It really changed my whole intellectual scaffolding."
This is the third time the environmental studies department has invited Tempest Williams to speak at the College, which is unusual, Andrew Friedland, chair of the department, said as he introduced Tempest Williams.
Tempest Williams also visited an environmental studies class this week, and spoke with the students about what "restorative measures" means.
"I had to stop and catch my breath over the thoughtfulness of the students," she said in an interview.
Talking with other students, Tempest Williams encouraged them to find their own strengths and apply them.
"It's so easy to be a spectator," she said in an interview. "How do we make a choice to become a participant?"
