CSF professor to join ranks of Guggenheim fellows

Author and conservationist William deBuys to use grant to write seventh book

Anne Constable | The New Mexican

5/7/2008 - 5/8/08

William E. deBuys, an environmental historian, conservationist and author of six books, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship. It is the second year in a row that a College of Santa Fe professor has won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

DeBuys is one of 190 artists, scientists and scholars from the U.S. and Canada to receive the prestigious award this year. The Guggenheim Foundation handed out a total of $8.2 million (an average of $43,200) for research.

DeBuys will use the money to write a book on the environmental history of the North American Southwest. In 1997, he gave the Calvin Horn lectures at The University of New Mexico. Because of other commitments, he was never able to turn the four lectures into a book.

Now, he said, "I want to work on that material, bring it up to date while asking the question, 'Can an understanding of the past changes in the land help us to prepare for the changes that are already in progress or are coming our way as a result of climate change?' "

According to deBuys, the impacts of climate change "promise to be heavier for the Southwest than probably any other region of North America, outside of the Arctic."

He'll be taking a sabbatical from the College of Santa Fe and hitting the road to interview other scholars and scientists.

"There is no greater luxury in this world than to be able to spend time on what interests you the most. That's what a grant like this allows," he said.

According to the foundation's Web site, the fellowships are given to people who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. The amounts are adjusted to the needs of the fellows, their resources and the scope of their work.

DeBuys is a professor of Documentary Studies at the college and the author of Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985); River of Traps: A Village Life (1990); Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California (1999), Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell (2001), Valles Caldera: A New Vision for New Mexico's National Preserve (2006); and The Walk (2007).

From 1997 to 2004, he directed the Valle Grande Grass Bank in Northern New Mexico, and from 2001 to 2005, he was chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve.

For 30 years, he has owned a farm in El Valle that was the subject of his book, River of Traps, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

DeBuys was a Morehead scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the university of Texas at Austin.

Last year, Dana Levin, an associate professor at the College of Santa Fe and head of the creative writing, humanities and interdisciplinary studies department, was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals. Other Northern New Mexicans who have won the coveted prizes include Sally Denton, historian and author, 2006; Debbie Fleming Caffery, photographer, 2005; Arthur Sze, poet, 1997; Howard Korder, playwright, 1996; Marc Simmons, historian, 1980; Linda Feferman, documentary filmmaker, 1977; Fred Turner, writer, 1981; Alfonso Ortiz, anthropologist, 1975; and William Clift III, photographer, 1974, 1980.

The ranks of the Guggenheim fellows include famous Americans such as photographer Ansel Adams, poet W.H. Auden, composer Aaron Copland, dancer Martha Graham, poet Langston Hughes, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and writer Vladimir Nabokov. To date, 229 Guggenheim fellows have received Pulitzer Prizes.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.