Forgotten Language Tour Held at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Forgotten Language Tour, a national tour of prominent nature writers and poets, will be held Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 5-6, at Holy Cross. Merging social justice ideals with concerns for local ecological issues, The Forgotten Language Tour has visited more than 30 states in eight years, giving readings and panel discussions, meeting with students, faculty, and local environmental activists, and hiking in the surrounding area.

Sponsored by a number of offices at Holy Cross, Clark University Environmental School, Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Regional Environmental Council, and the Orion Society, all events are free and open to the public.

The schedule is as follows:

Tuesday, Oct. 5:

9 a.m.-A visit to the community gardens, Hadwen Park, Green Hill Park and the Coal Mine Brook Trout Restoration Project with local activists.  Meet at 8:45 a.m., at the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.

1 p.m.-A panel discussion, "The End of Nature?" will be held in Room 519 of the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.

2:30 p.m.-A panel discussion, "Living in Hope," will be held in Room 519 of the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.

4:30 p.m.-A hike around the West Boylston reservoir will be conducted.

7:30 p.m.-Readings by Bill McKibben, Janisse Ray, and Charles Siebert will be held in Room 519 of the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.  McKibben, who lives in the Adirondacks, is the author of The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, and Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families.  His nonfiction works have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and Doubletake.  Ray, a naturalist and environmental activist, has published her work in Wild Earth, Orion Magazine, Florida Naturalist and Georgia Wildlife.  The author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, she is a nature commentator on the Peach State Public Radio Network.  Siebert, the author of Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, has published articles, essays and poems in The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and Outside.

Wednesday, Oct. 6:

2 p.m.-A hike in Broad Meadow Brook Nature Preserve with naturalist Gail Howe.  Meet at 1:45 p.m., in the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.

7:30 p.m.-Readings by Freeman House, Sandra Alcosser and Richard Nelson will be held in Suites B and C in the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.  House, a former commercial fisherman, is the co-founder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Group in northern California.  He is the author of Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, considered to be an essential handbook for West Coast environmentalists.  Alcosser, a poet and professor at San Diego State University, directed Central Park's "Poems in the Park" program.  Her first collection of poems, A Fish to Feed All Hunger, won the Associated Writing Programs Award Series and her most recent book, Except by Nature, received the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award and the Larry Levis Poet Prize.  Nelson, an anthropologist who lives in Sitka, Alaska, is the author of several books, including Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in North America, and The Island Within, which won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.