Breathing Easier: Air Pollution Challenges and Solutions | Register Here
At the 2025 Wallace Stegner Center Symposium—convened by the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment—experts from a wide range of disciplines will explore one of Utah’s greatest challenges: air pollution.
Now in its 30th year, the annual Stegner Symposium brings together community leaders, scholars, policymakers and scientists to address some of the most pressing and complex environmental issues we face.
This year’s symposium will consider air pollution’s environmental and human health tolls—including unequal burdens that air pollution places on disadvantaged communities. Air pollution remains a vexing problem in Utah, where winters bring inversions and particulate matter pollution, and summers deliver increased ozone pollution.
Finding solutions to these thorny problems becomes only more vital with each passing year. Emerging threats, such as dust from the shrinking Great Salt Lake and intensifying wildfire smoke, further compound longstanding air pollution problems.
Experts at the symposium will share potential solutions, including those that have been successful in other parts of the country. The symposium will feature talks by Nsedu Obot Witherspoon, executive director of the Children’s Environmental Health Network, and Ann Carlson, who is the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the UCLA School of Law. Panels will include notable participants such as Erin Mendenhall, mayor of Salt Lake City, and Brian Steed, Great Salt Lake commissioner for the State of Utah.
“We are delighted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Stegner Symposium,” said Lincoln Davies, co-director of the Wallace Stegner Center and professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law. “It is a monumental moment for our center, reflecting decades of stellar leadership by our dear colleague Bob Keiter, and it is only fitting that this symposium focuses on an issue so deeply important to the Wasatch Front and all of Utah.”
More information about the event, speakers and registration is available here.