Andrea Heidinger, Salt Lake City, Utah : an interview by Rob DeBirk

Transcript (41 pages) of interview of Andrea Heidinger by Rob DeBirk, on August 4, 2007

Andrea was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but spent her childhood in Salt Lake City, Utah. In high school she was aware of the poor air quality in the valley and started to bike to school, "Inversions are natural, but what the inversions trapped, the smog and pollution, was not." Her classes and teachers at Judge Memorial High School were instrumental in her environmental mindset. She has worked for both the Parks Service and the Forest Service at the Grand Canyon. Andrea is very knowledgeable about multiuse issues and working with various shareholders in public lands. She went to graduate school for art at the University of Idaho and decided then that she is a post-consumer artifacts artist, meaning nothing was thrown away. She believes that art should be assessable and benign to the environment, there's a lot of waste that comes out of art. She started teaching environmental education at Red Butte Garden and has been incorporating that into her art. Andrea and her husband also started the Eat Local Challenge here in Utah. Currently she is working at the Green Building Center, the host of a lot of workshops for the layperson on green living. Utah Environmental Oral History Project. Interviewer: Rob DeBirk