Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Join the community of UPR donors who make this station possible. YOUR membership donation has the power to make a big difference! GIVE NOW

Doug Peacock: Military Veterans And The Healing Wilderness On Access Utah

outsidebozeman.com

Doug Peacock served in Vietnam as a Green Beret medic, and came home an emotional and spiritual wreck. After the war, he crawled into the mountains and found that solitude in wilderness was exactly what he needed to confront the demons of Vietnam. And he credits grizzly bears with restoring his soul.
 
Doug Peacock, the model for Hayduke in Edward Abbey's “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” will give the keynote address at a symposium in Salt Lake City this week titled “This Land Is Your Land: Toward a Better Understanding of Nature's Resiliency-Building and Restorative Power for Armed Forces Personnel, Veterans, and their Families.”  The symposium is Wednesday through Saturday at the University of Utah Conference Center. Doug Peacock’s keynote address is Wednesday evening at 7:00. He returns to Access Utah on Tuesday.

Peacock was the subject of a feature film about grizzlies and Vietnam, Peacock’s War, and lectures regularly about wilderness and veterans issues. He lives in Emigrant, Montana, and spends time in the Sonoran Desert, southeast Utah and with the grizzlies of Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. Married to Andrea Peacock, he has two children with whom he visits the wilderness and three cats who share his homes.

Peacock’s books include Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness (Henry Holt, 1990), ¡Baja! (Bulfinch Press, 1991), Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005), and The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears (The Lyons Press, 2006) which was co-written with Andrea Peacock. He was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a Lannan Fellow in 2011 for his work on archeology, climate change and the peopling of North America, published in 2013 as In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: A Renegade Naturalist Considers Global Warming, the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene (Counterpunch/AK Press) now out in a revised edition.  

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.