Participants and Papers

 

David Abram

riverspell@earthlink.net

Conference Paper:
“Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet: some reflections”

Featured Article:
“Magic and the Machine: Notes on Technology and Animism in an Era of Ecological Wipe-Out”

Dr. David Abram, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, David’s work has been catalytic for the emergence of several new disciplines, including the steadily growing field of ecopsychology (in both its clinical and its research branches). His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies.  A recipient of the international Lannan Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Watson Foundations, in 2014 David held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo. Dr. Abram's work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. His philosophical craft is informed by his fieldwork with indigenous peoples in southeast Asia and the Americas, as well as by the European tradition of phenomenology. His ideas are often discussed and debated (sometimes heatedly) within the pages of various academic journals, including Environmental Ethics and the Journal of Environmental Philosophy. David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview, one which roots human cognition in the dynamic sentience of the body while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the uncanny intelligence of other animals, each of whom encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective. A close student of the Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) of diverse indigenous peoples, David's work also articulates the entwinement of human subjectivity with the varied sensitivities of the many plants upon which we depend, as well as with the agency and dynamism of the particular places, or bioregions, that surround and sustain our communities. In recent years Dr. Abram's work has come to be associated with a broad movement loosely termed “New Materialism,” due to his espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality. A Distinguished Fellow of Schumacher College in England, David is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), a consortium of individuals and organizations dedicated to cultural metamorphosis through a rejuvenation of place-based oral culture. He lives with his two children in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
 


 

Frederique Apffel-Marglin

fmarglin@smith.edu

Conference Paper:
“Reanimating the World through Dying to our Egos: Amazonian Shamanism”

Featured Article:
“Post-Materialist Integral Ecology: Experiments in the Peruvian High Amazon”

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, emerita Professor in Anthropology, Smith College, founded the nonprofit organization, Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration in 2009, dedicated to the regeneration of both the local forest and of indigenous agriculture and culture in the Peruvian Upper Amazon. The center is an educational organization that aims to integrate theory, research, activism, and spirituality. Apffel-Marglin was a research adviser at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, an affiliate of the United Nations University. With the Harvard economist Stephen Marglin she formed an interdisciplinary and international collaborative team that produced three books on critical approaches to development and globalization. Her newest book, co-authored with Robert Tindall and David Shearer, is titled Sacred Soil: Biochar and the Regeneration of the Earth, North Atlantic Books, 2017. She has published an additional 13 books including (with Tariq Banuri) Who Will Save the Forests?: Knowledge, Power and Environmental Destruction (Delhi: Zed Boks 1993) and (with Stephen A. Marglin) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue; A Study Prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Her interests cover ritual, gender, political ecology, critiques of development, science studies and Andean-Amazonian shamanism. Her areas of specialization are South Asia and the Amazonian Andes. She currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as in Lamas, San Martin, Peru, the field campus of her nonprofit organization.

 

 


 

Jeannette Armstrong

Jeannette.Armstrong@ubc.ca

Conference Paper:
“An Okanogan Worldview of Society”

Featured Article:
“Indigenous Economics”

Jeannette Armstrong is Syilx Okanagan, a fluent speaker and teacher of the Nsyilxcn Okanagan language and a traditional knowledge keeper of the Okanagan Nation.  She is a founder of En’owkin, the Okanagan Nsyilxcn language and knowledge institution of higher learning of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.  She currently is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Okanagan Philosophy at UBC Okanagan. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Ethics and Syilx Indigenous Literatures. She is the recipient of the Eco Trust Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership and in 2016 the BC George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an author whose published works include poetry, prose and children’s literary titles and academic writing on a wide variety of Indigenous issues.  She currently serves on Canada’s Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

 

 


 

Samara Brock

samara.brock@yale.edu

Conference Paper:
“Unsettling the Land: Indigeneity, Ontology, and Hybridity”

Featured Article:
“Mainstreaming Morality: An Examination of Moral Ecologies as a Form of Resistance”

Samara Brock is pursuing her PhD at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She holds a master’s in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s in Food Culture from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy. She has worked in international agriculture in Cuba and Argentina, as a food systems planner for the City of Vancouver, and more recently as a program officer for the Tides Canada Foundation, funding nonprofit organizations working on complex conservation, climate change, and food security initiatives. Her current research focuses on the development of environmental knowledge and expertise through engaging with organizations that are attempting to transform the future of the global food system.

 

 


 

Timothy Brown

tibrown@ngs.org

Conference Paper:
“Science, Storytelling, and Students: National Geographic's On Campus Initiative”

Featured Articles:
“Return to Rwanda”
“F&ES Students Apply ‘Systems Thinking’ To Flint Water Contamination Case”

Timothy Brown is Manager of University Initiatives for the National Geographic Society, a new venture dedicated to building partnerships with key universities through live student events in science and storytelling. A conservation biologist by training, he researched Canada lynx for the US Fish and Wildlife Service before becoming a high school environmental science teacher. After eight years as an award-winning educator, he returned to graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies where he studied environmental anthropology and served as Editor of Sage Magazine. He then served as a communications officer for the School, where he organized the Science & Storytelling Symposium in 2016. Timothy, who holds a bachelor of science degree in conservation biology and a bachelor of arts degree in music, was a founding steering committee member of the Yale Environmental Humanities Initiative. In addition to his work with National Geographic, he serves as Editor of Connecticut Woodlands, a quarterly publication of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association. He lives in New Haven, Conn., with his wife and son.

 

 


 

Prasenjit Duara

prasenjit.duara@duke.edu

Conference Paper:
“Fluid Histories: Oceans as the Metaphor of History”

Featured Article:
“Environmental Humanities and Sustainable Modernity in Asia (and Beyond)”

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015). In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.

 

 


 

Heather Eaton

heaton@ustpaul.ca  

Conference Paper:
“The Human Quest to Live in a Cosmos”

Featured Article:
“The Challenges of Worldview Transformation: ‘To Rethink and Refeel Our Origins and Destiny’”

Heather Eaton holds an interdisciplinary doctorate in theology, feminism and ecology from Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto and is a professor in Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. She works in engaging religions on ecological, social and ethical issues. She has published extensively on ecofeminism, ecospirituality, cosmology and ecojustice, as well as the intersection of science, evolution, and religion. Her main publications are: Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation: New Perspectives on Nonviolent Theories, Heather Eaton and Lauren Levesque, eds. (Equinox, 2016); The Intellectual Journey of Thomas Berry: Imagining the Earth Community, ed. (2014); Ecological Awareness: Exploring Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics, (with Sigurd Bergmann, 2011); Introducing Ecofeminist Theologies (2005); Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Religion, Culture, Context, (with Lois Ann Lorentzen, 2003); editor of Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, Special Issue: “Evolution,” (2007); Ecotheology, “Gender, Religion and Ecology,” (2006); Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, Special Issue: Thomas Berry (2001), plus dozens of book chapters and articles. Heather works as a socially engaged academic with various national and international groups on religion, ecology, social issues, animal rights, nonviolence and peace.

 

 


 

John Grim

john.grim@yale.edu

Conference Paper:
“Sensing, Minding, Creating”

John Grim is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar teaching in the joint MA program in religion and ecology at Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Yale Divinity School. He is co-founder and co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with his wife, Mary Evelyn Tucker. With Tucker, Grim directed a 10 conference series and book project at Harvard on “World Religions and Ecology.” Grim is the author of The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). Grim edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001). Grim and Tucker are authors of Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014). They have edited the following volumes: Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994); Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? (Daedalus 2001); Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community (Orbis, 2014); and Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to Journey of the Universe (Orbis, 2016), and with Willis Jenkins the Routledge Handbook on Religion and Ecology (Routledge, 2016). John is the co-executive producer of the Emmy award winning film, Journey of the Universe. He is the President of the American Teilhard Association.

 

 


 

David Haberman

dhaberma@indiana.edu

Conference Paper:
“Affectual Insight: Love as a Way of Being and Knowing”

Featured Article:
“Faces in the Trees”

David L. Haberman is Professor and former Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.  He holds a Ph.D. in History of Religions from the University of Chicago.  Although he has studied and taught a great variety of religious traditions, he specializes in Hinduism and has spent many years conducting ethnographic and textual research in India.  He also teaches courses on religion, ecology and environmentalism.  His recent work focuses on the worshipful interaction with natural forms of divinity in India, such as rivers, trees, stones and mountains.  Much of Haberman’s work has centered on the culture of Braj, an active pilgrimage site in northern India long associated with Krishna and known for its lively temple festivals, performative traditions, and literary creations.  His publications include Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Raganuga Bhakti Sadhana (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), The Bhaktirasamritasindhu of Rupa Gosvamin (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2003), River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), and People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).  He is currently working on a new book tentatively titled “Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan.”

 

 


 

David Haskell

dhaskell@sewanee.edu

Conference Paper:
“Contemplative Studies of the 'Natural' World”

Featured Articles:
“The Seasons Aren’t What They Used to Be”
“Listening to the Thoughts of the Forest”

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world.His latest book, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking, 2017), examines the many ways that trees and humans are connected. Deborah Blum, Pulitzer winner, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, and director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT says of The Songs of Trees, “David George Haskell may be the finest literary nature writer working today. The Songs of Trees – compelling, lyrical, wise – is a case in point.” His first book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking, 2012), was winner of the National Academies’ Best Book Award for 2013, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award, winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, runner-up for the 2013 PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and winner, in its Chinese translation, of the 2016 Dapeng Nature Writing Award. A profile by James Gorman in The New York Times said of Haskell that he “thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist”. E. O. Wilson wrote that The Forest Unseen was “a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry.” The Forest Unseen has been translated into ten languages. Haskell has also written about the biology of climate change and same-sex marriage for The New York Times. Haskell holds degrees from the University of Oxford (BA) and from Cornell University (PhD). He is Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South, where he served as Chair of Biology. He is a 2014-2015 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and an Elective Member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. His scientific research on animal ecology, evolution, and conservation has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, among others. He serves on the boards and advisory committees of local and national land conservation groups. Haskell’s classes have received national attention for the innovative ways they combine action in the community with contemplative practice. In 2009, the Carnegie and CASE Foundations named him Professor of the Year for Tennessee, an award given to college professors who have achieved national distinction and whose work shows “extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching.” The Oxford American featured him in 2011 as one of the southern U.S.’s most creative teachers. His teaching has been profiled in USA Today, The Tennesseean, and other newspapers.

 

 


 

Willis Jenkins

wjj2c@virginia.edu

Conference Paper:
“Listening for Coastal Futures: The Conservatory Project”

Featured Article:
“Environmental Humanities Conservatory: Listening for Coastal Futures”

Willis Jenkins, PhD is Professor of Religion, Ethics, & Environment at the University of Virginia, where he is also co-director of the Institute of Practical Ethics. With Matthew Burtner, Jenkins leads the Environmental Humanities Conservatory, a transdisciplinary initiative focused on listening to environmental change with ways of knowing from arts, humanities, and sciences. With Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, he is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2016). He is author of two award-winning books: Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics & Christian Theology (2008), which won a Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (2013), which won an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

 

 


 

Sean Kelly

skelly@ciis.edu

Conference Paper:
“Gaia and a Second Axial Age”

Featured Article:
“Five Principles of Integral Ecology”

Sean Kelly, Ph.D., is professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). He is the author of Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era, co-editor of The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era, and co-translator of Edgar Morin’s Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. Along with his academic work, Sean teaches taiji and is a facilitator of the group process Work that Reconnects developed by Joanna Macy.

 

 


 

Eduardo Kohn

eduardo.kohn@mcgill.ca

Conference Paper:
“Forest for the Trees: Spirit, psychedelic science, and the politics of ecologizing thought as a planetary ethics”

Featured Article:
“Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene”

Eduardo Kohn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.  He is best known for the book, How Forests Think, which has been translated into several languages.  It was short-listed for the Prix littéraire François Sommer and won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize.   His research continues to be concerned with capacitating sylvan thinking in its many forms as a way to fashion an ethics for living on a planet in ecological crisis.

 

 


 

Thomas Lovejoy

tlovejoy@gmu.edu

Featured Article:
“The Obligations of a Biologist”

Thomas E. Lovejoy was elected University Professor at George Mason in March 2010. He previously held the Biodiversity Chair at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment and was President from 2002-2008. An ecologist who has worked in the Brazilian Amazon since 1965, he works on the interface of science and environmental policy. Starting in the 1970’s he helped bring attention to the issue of tropical deforestation and in 1980 published the first estimate of global extinction rates (in the Global 2000 Report to the President). He conceived the idea for the long term study on forest fragmentation in the Amazon (started in 1978) which is the largest experiment in landscape ecology, the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems project (also known as the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project). He also coined the term “Biological diversity”, originated the concept of debt-for-nature swaps and has worked on the interaction between climate change and biodiversity for more than 30 years. He is the founder of the public television series “Nature”. In the past, he served as the Senior Advisor to the President of the United Nations Foundation, as the Chief Biodiversity Advisor to the World Bank as well as Lead Specialist for the Environment for the Latin American region, as the Assistant Secretary for Environmental and External Affairs for the Smithsonian Institution, and as Executive Vice President of World Wildlife Fund-US. In 2002, he was awarded the Tyler Prize, and in 2009 he was the winner of BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology Category. In 2012 he received the Blue Planet Prize. He has served on advisory councils in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. In 2009 he was appointed Conservation Fellow by the National Geographic Society. He chaired the Scientific and Technical Panel for the Global Environment Facility which provides funding related to the international environmental conventions from 2009-2013 and serves as Advisor to the current Chair.  He received his B.S. and Ph.D. (Biology) from Yale University.
 


 

Sam Mickey

sam_mickey@yahoo.com

Unable to attend but he will be editing a volume from the conference.

Featured Article:
“Imagination: Showing the Sense of Environmental Ethics”

Sam Mickey, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor in the Theology and Religious Studies department and the Environmental Studies program at the University of San Francisco. He has worked for several years at the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. His teaching, writing, and research are oriented around the intersection of religious, scientific, and philosophical perspectives on human-Earth relations. He is an author and editor of several books, including Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence (Routledge 2015) and The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era (SUNY 2017).

 

 


 

Susan O’Connor

Susan O’Connor is an environmental and arts advocate. She has served on the boards of several art museums, including the Menil in Houston, Texas. She has also been a board member of the Orion Society and the American Prairie Reserve. She cofounded several nonprofits, including Pacific Writers Connection, Ala Kukui: Hana Retreat, Ohana Makamae, and Families First both in Boston and Missoula. She is coeditor with Annick Smith of Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place and The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

 

 


 

Mitchell Thomashow

Mitchellthomashow@gmail.com

Conference Papers:
“The Five Qualities”
“Biosphere Network Archetypes”

Featured Article:
“Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene”

Mitchell Thomashow devotes his life and work to promoting ecological awareness, sustainable living, creative learning, improvisational thinking, constructive networking, and organizational excellence. Currently he is engaged in teaching, writing, and executive consulting, cultivating opportunities and exchanges that transform how people engage with ecological learning, sustainability, and the arts. He is the author of three books, all published with the MIT Press, Ecological Identity, Bringing the Biosphere Home, and The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus. He is working on a fourth book, To Know the World: The Future of Environmental Learning, to be published by The MIT Press in 2020. From 2015-2017 he served as the Sustainability Catalyst Fellow at Philanthropy Northwest in Seattle Washington. He wrote a report, Pacific Northwest Changemakers, that profiles eight exemplary community-based, grassroots sustainability projects in both rural and urban regions. From 2011-2015, he was the Director of the Second Nature Presidential Fellows Program, working with university presidents to promote a comprehensive sustainability agenda on their campuses. He was the President of Unity College from 2006-2011. With his management team he integrated concepts of ecology, sustainability, natural history, wellness, participatory governance, and community service into all aspects of college and community life. From 1976-2006 he was the Chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Antioch University New England. He founded an interdisciplinary environmental studies doctoral program and worked collaboratively to grow and nourish a suite of engaging Masters programs, geared to working adults. Thomashow lives in the hill country of southwest New Hampshire in the shadow of Mount Monadnock. He loves to explore the fields, forests, wetlands, hills, and lakes of Northern New England. His recreational interests include basketball, baseball, bicycling, board games, jazz piano, electronic keyboards, guitars, hiking, and lake swimming.

 

 


 

Mary Evelyn Tucker

maryevelyn.tucker@yale.edu

Conference Paper:
“Confucian Cosmology and Ecological Ethics: Qi, Li, and the Role of the Human”

Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director with John Grim of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. Her special area of study is Asian religions. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in Japanese Confucianism. Since 1997 she has been a Research Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. Her Confucian publications include: Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism (SUNY, 1989) and The Philosophy of Qi (Columbia University Press, 2007). With Tu Weiming she edited two volumes on Confucian Spirituality (Crossroad, 2003, 2004). Her concern for the growing environmental crisis, especially in Asia, led her to organize with John Grim a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard (1995-1998). Together they are series editors for the ten volumes from the conferences distributed by Harvard University Press. In this series she co-edited Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997), Confucianism and Ecology (Harvard, 1998), and Hinduism and Ecology (Harvard, 2000).

 

 


 

Mark Turin

mark.turin@ubc.ca
 
Conference Paper:
“Rising Voices: Indigenous Language Resurgence as Organic Interconnectivity”

Featured Article:
“Voices of vanishing worlds: Endangered languages, orality, and cognition”

Mark Turin, PhD is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter. At the University of British Columbia, Mark serves as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program, Acting Co-Director of the University’s new Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology. Before joining UBC, Mark was an Associate Research Scientist with the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University, and the Founding Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative. He continues to hold an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School Forestry & Environmental Studies. Mark directs both the World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. For over twenty years, Mark’s regional focus has been the Himalayan region (particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan), and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Mark is very privileged to have had the opportunity to work in collaborative partnership with members of the Thangmi-speaking communities of eastern Nepal and Darjeeling district in India since 1996, and since 2014 with members of the Heiltsuk First Nation through a Haíɫzaqv Language Mobilization Partnership in which UBC is a member. He is the author or co-author of four books, three travel guides, the editor of eight volumes, and he edits a series on oral literature, and he tweets @markturin.

 

 


 

Paul Waldau

pwaldau@gmail.com

Conference Paper:
“Humilities, Animalities and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community”

Publications

Paul Waldau is an educator who works at the intersection of animal studies, law, ethics, religion, and cultural studies. A Professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, Paul has been the senior faculty member for the Master of Science graduate program in Anthrozoology since its founding in 2011, and was the Program Director from 2014-2017. Paul also taught Animal Law at Harvard Law School from 2002 to 2014, and he has been teaching courses since 2009 in Harvard’s Summer School through which he will offer the online course “The Animal-Human Divide” in Summer 2018. Paul was one of the organizing members of the The Great Ape Project-International, and served from 1995 through 2008 in the capacity of board member, as well as serving for years as the Vice-President and Executive Director. After helping to found the Animals and Religion group at the American Academy of Religion, Paul spent a decade teaching ethics and public policy at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, where he also was the Director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy until 2009. He has completed five books, the most recent of which are Animal Studies—An Introduction (2013 Oxford University Press) and Animal Rights (2011 Oxford University Press). He is also co-editor of the groundbreaking A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (2006 Columbia University Press). His first book was The Specter of Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of Animals (2001 Oxford University Press).
 


 

Julianne Warren

coyotetrail.net@gmail.com

Conference Paper:
“Hopes Echo: Learning A Dead Birdsong”

Featured Article:
“Hopes Echo”

Julianne Warren has a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology. She is author of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition. This book unfolds an intellectual journey of twentieth-century ecological-ethical thinker Aldo Leopold toward his concept of land health. Julianne also writes creatively on dimensions of human-lifescape relations, including critiques of cultures of domination and possibilities of alternate re/generative ones. Formerly, Julianne was on the Global Liberal Studies faculty of New York University where she taught environmental studies classes. At NYU she received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Research Award for her work alongside students in the climate justice movement. Julianne has been a Senior Scholar and continues as a Fellow of the Center for Humans and Nature. She currently is at work on an environmental humanities book project. This features an unusual recording of an old man imitating his memory of an extinct bird endemic to Aotearoa/New Zealand. These sound traces are helping her to explore how learning to listen can help us remember what makes for worthy hope and to do what it asks of us. Julianne feels most at home in New York and Alaska. She is now residing in Fairbanks.

 

 

 


 

Brooke Williams

brookus426@gmail.com

Conference Paper:
“Imaginal Ecology”

Featured Article:
“Flirting Dragonflies”

 

Brooke Williams has spent the last thirty years advocating for wilderness. He is the author of four books, including Open Midnight, Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jeffries, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams. His journalistic pieces have appeared in Outside, Huffington Post, Orion, and Saltfront. He and his wife, Terry Tempest Williams, divide their time between Utah and Wyoming.