Green Fork Utah: Only a Few More Days to Save for the Conference!

Only a Few More Days Until the Early-Bird Deadline!

20th Annual Utah Enviornmental Education Conference
Thursday, November 19 (evening opener) through Saturday, November 21, 2009
At the Wasatch Retreat and Conference Center
75 South 200 East, Downtown SLC

Early-Bird Registration ends
this Friday, October 23.

Register Now!

Please Note: As you may have noticed, we are NOT sending out hard-copies of the Registration Packet. In order to reduce our footprint and to save a little money on postage, we are doing registration online.
For questions, please contact Nicole Thomas at nicole@usee.org.

Keynote Speakers

Robert Michael Pyle

Robert Michael Pyle has a Master's Degree in Nature Interpretation, which was followed by a doctorate in Ecology and Environmental Studies from Yale University. In 1971he founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and later chaired its Monarch Project. The Society for Conservation Biology awarded Pyle a Distinguished Service Award in 1993. For many years he has been a full-time writer and independent biologist and teacher. His fifteen books include Wintergreen (winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing), The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs, and Walking the High Ridge, as well as The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterflies of Cascadia, and several other standard butterfly works. His most recent book, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature and was a finalist for the Orion and Washington Book Awards. He lives along a tributary of the Lower Columbia River in southwest Washington with his wife, Thea Linnaea Pyle, a weaver and botanist.

Tim Brown

Tim Brown, a native of Salt Lake, is the Executive Director for Tracy Aviary. Tim’s interest in EE began in college when he participated in outreach programs and, in 1993, he completed an internship at USEE. Over the next few years, he worked his way up the ladder to become the Executive Director of USEE in 1996. In 2002, Tim became the director of the new non-profit Center for Green Space Design and in 2005, Tim jumped at the opportunity to be the Executive Director of Tracy Aviary. Tim has also served on many local boards including Friends of Great Salt Lake (current), Four Corners School of Outdoor Education, and HawkWatch International. Tim has degrees from the University of Vermont and Antioch-University – Seattle, and lives in Salt Lake with his wife and two children.

Concurrent Sessions

The conference will also be featuring an Opening Event on Thursday, November 19. (To Be Determined) We have many exciting conference sessions, including regional presentations and some very fun feild trips. Some of this year's concurrent session line up are:

Designing Games for Learning
Sowing the Seeds for a New Future: Garden Education Program at the Salt Lake County Jail
How Partnerships between Colleges and EE Programs Can Provide Great Opportunites
Home on the Range with GoogleEarth: The Impacts of Grazing Over Generations
Assessment and Evaluation 101: How to Get Started

Field Trips

We also have some awesome field trips lined up:

Repertory Dance Theater's Green Map Project
The Nature Conservancy's Shoreland Preserve Tour
The Hogle Zoo
and of course, there will be the usual Guidelines Training during this time as well.

Teacher Day

This year's conference also is featuring a "Teacher Day" which will take place on Saturday from 8:00 am to 3:30 pm. There are at least 2 or more sessions directly related to teachers going on all day. Some exapmples of sessions include: