Award winning Alaskan author Dan O’Neill is giving a talk at the Egan Lecture Hall on Wednesday, July 16 at 7 p.m. O’Neill wrote The Firecracker Boys: The Story of Project Chariot and the Roots of Environmentalism.

In 1958, Father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, unveiled his plan to create an instant harbor on the coast of Alaska by exploding a string of nuclear bombs.  Instead he accidentally helped launch the environmental movement.  With accompanying slides, O’Neill will tell the story of Project Chariot—how a small Eskimo village, along with a handful of Alaska scientists and conservationists, thwarted Teller’s scheme and sparked a new era of environmental awareness.

O’Neill’s other works of literary non-fiction include The Last Giant of Beringia (2004) about the Bering Land Bridge and A Land Gone Lonesome, which centers on a canoe trip down the upper Yukon River.