- This event has passed.
Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World: A Memoir
March 13 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World: A Memoir
Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World: A Memoir event at Urban Ecology Center, 1500 E Park Place
Wednesday, March 13, 6 pm
Professor, activist, and UW-Madison alum Trish O’Kane appears to share her uplifting new memoir. In Birding to Change the World, O’Kane considers what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment. Cohosted by Urban Ecology Center.
Register for this event here (https://30781a.
Trish O’Kane never expected to be a birder. But after Hurricane Katrina shattered her life in New Orleans, watching birds thrive throughout the devastated city became her salvation. Soon O’Kane found herself pursuing an environmental science PhD in Wisconsin, where she became a full-on bird obsessive – logging hours and hours in a stunningly diverse urban park, filling field notebooks with observations of bird doings and dramas, and volunteering in a wildlife rehabilitation center bird nursery. But it wasn’t until that park, her bird-watching haven, was threatened with development that O’Kane became an environmental activist. Taking her cues from the birds, she mustered a mighty flock of fellow human park lovers to raise their voices and save the park.
In Birding to Change the World, O’Kane recounts the astonishing science of bird life and shows what birds can teach us and how that education can be a transformative force for social change. O’Kane’s is a feel-good book about transformation, action, and the joy of the natural world.
Trish O’Kane is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Vermont, where she teaches the course Birding to Change the World. Before studying the natural sciences, O’Kane worked as a hu
man rights investigative journalist for a decade in Central America and five years in the Deep South. She has written for Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times.
