The Sierra Nevada: Science and Revelation

In The Paradise Notebooks, Richard J. Nevle and Steven Nightingale take us across the legendary Sierra Nevada mountain range on a journey illuminated by scientific insight and incandescent poetry. From granite to aspen, to fire, to a rare, endemic species of butterfly, the essays and poems in the book explore the natural history and mystical content of each wild element. As they weave in vignettes from a ninety-mile backpacking trip across the range with their families, Nevle and Nightingale powerfully reconceive the Sierra Nevada as both earthly matter and transcendental offering.

Join Richard, Steven, and Prof. Nicole Ardoin in a webinar conversation about The Paradise Notebooks and Ardoin’s research on the development of pro-environmental behavior. In a time of rapid environmental degradation, there is a way forward—a whole-minded, learned, loving attention to place that can rekindle our joyful relationship with the living world.
 

Speakers

Nicole Ardoin
Sykes Family Director, E-IPER, Stanford University

Professor Nicole Ardoin is the Sykes Family Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). She is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Ardoin and her Social Ecology Lab group research motivations for and barriers to environmental behavior at the individual and collective scales.

Richard Nevle
Deputy Director, Earth Systems Program, Stanford University
Senior Lecturer, Earth Systems, Stanford University

Richard Nevle serves as the deputy director of the Earth Systems program at Stanford, where he is dedicated to the intellectual formation of the next generation of interdisciplinary social-environmental changemakers. As a senior lecturer in the program, Richard received Stanford’s highest teaching honor. Richard has authored numerous scientific articles and is the co-author of “The Paradise Notebooks,” the subject of today’s event.

Steven Nightingale
Author

Steven Nightingale is the co-author of “The Paradise Notebooks” and writes novels, sonnets, and long essays. His interests include the medieval art of Spain and Italy, the wild country of the American West and the Caribbean, cooking for his wife and daughter, astronomy, venture capital, the quantitative arts, and Emily Dickinson. He divides his time between Palo Alto, his beloved home state of Nevada, and the Albayzin, a barrio in Granada, Spain.