Wade Graham on Our Responsibility to Our Own Communities

Authors in the Tent is a professionally filmed series of interviews with established and emerging authors conducted in a tent Ona Russell purchased during the pandemic. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and the 1001 Arabian Nights, the tent—elemental, ancient, and ubiquitous—serves as a magical backdrop for literary conversation.

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On the fourth episode of the new fourth season, Ona Russell talks with Wade Graham, author of Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii and Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World.

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This series is in support of the charities Tents-4-Homeless, PATH, Alpha Project, and VVSD.

Ona Russell holds a PhD in literature from UC San Diego where she also taught for many years. She is author of three award-winning historical mysteries and the recently released Son of Nothingness: A Novel of Appearances.

Wade Graham is a writer, historian, & landscape designer with a practice based in Los Angeles. His writing, on cultural history, environment, urbanism, landscape, art, and other topics, has appeared frequently in the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other publications. His books include Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018), Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (HarperCollins, 2016), and American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyard, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Ourselves (HarperCollins, 2011). He has a Ph.D in American history from UCLA and has taught urban and environmental policy at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University since 2009. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, a Colorado River restoration group based in Salt Lake City, Utah.