Best-selling author and naturalist Diane Ackerman to kick of Earth Week at Keystone
Keystone College will kick off 2024 Earth Week activities with a lecture featuring renowned author and naturalist Diane Ackerman on Sunday April 21, at 1 p.m. at the Theatre in Brooks on campus.
The lecture, “The Human Age: Why I’m Optimistic About Our Future” is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Keystone College Ecology Club, Honors Society and the Biology Department. Ms. Ackerman will be available for a book signing following the lecture and books will be available for purchase. Space for the event is limited, so registration is required For more information, contact Keystone Woodlands Campus Director Kelley Stewart at kelley.stewart@keystone.edu or call 570-945-8404 or click here to register. For information about Diane Ackerman visit https://www.dianeackerman.com/.
Ms. Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly-acclaimed works of poetry and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife; A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age. Her contributions to literature and science communication have been recognized with prestigious awards such as the 2022 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, and the Henry David Thoreau Prize. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize & NBCC Award. Notably, Ms. Ackerman’s bestselling book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie in 2017, depicting the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski’s heroic efforts to rescue hundreds during World War II.
The lecture marks the beginning of Earth Week at Keystone, with the college’s Ecology Club leading a series of environmentally themed activities. Throughout the week, the club will organize daily events, including environmentally focused crafts, a community clean-up initiative, nature photo contest and an introduction to fly fishing in collaboration with the Creekwalkers Club to name a few. The week will culminate in a traditional rubber duck race on the South Branch of Tunkhannock Creek, aimed at raising funds to support club members’ attendance at environmental conferences throughout the year.
Recognized as one of the best educational values in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Keystone offers more than 50 undergraduate and graduate degree options in liberal arts and science-based programs in business, communications, education, natural science, environmental science, and social sciences. Located on a beautiful 276-acre campus, 15 minutes from Scranton, Pa. and two hours from New York City and Philadelphia, Keystone is known for small class sizes and individual attention focused on student success through internships, research, and community involvement.
Quotes about Diane Ackerman’s book The Human Age:
“Diane Ackerman’s vivid writing, inexhaustible stock of insights, and unquenchable optimism have established her as a national treasure, and as one of our great authors. If you’ve read any of her previous books, you already know why you’ll love this latest one. If you haven’t read her previous books, you’re now about to become addicted to Diane Ackerman.” — Jared Diamond
“Ackerman has established herself over the last quarter of a century as one of our most adventurous, charismatic, and engrossing public science writers. She has demonstrated a rare versatility, a contagious curiosity, and a gift for painting quick, memorable tableaus drawn from research across a panoply of disciplines. The Human Age displays all of these alluring qualities…The Human Age is a dazzling achievement: immensely readable, lively, polymathic, audacious.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Part immersion memoir and part journalism, The Human Age is also many parts poetry. Optimism is her book’s overriding ambience. There is something for everyone here. News from afar and news from up close. Prophesies of possibility. Hope and wonder — for aren’t we all desperate for both?”–Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating… Ackerman offers a cross-cultural tour of human ingenuity. Her words invite us to feel the hope she feels.”–Washington Post
