Spring Creek Project

January 31: Kathleen Dean Moore

Spring Creek Project Senior Fellow Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmental thought-leader devoted to an unrelenting defense of the future against those who would pillage and wreck the planet. As a writer, Kathleen is best known for award-winning books of essays that celebrate and explore the meaning of the wet, wild world of rivers, islands, and tidal shores—Riverwalking, Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. But her growing alarm at the devastation of the natural world led her to focus her writing on the moral urgency of action against climate change and habitat destruction. Leaving her university position, Kathleen began to write in defense of the lovely, reeling world. Her latest books include Great Tide Rising: Finding Clarity and Moral Courage to Confront Climate Change and Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.

February 14: Reverend Fletcher Harper

Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest, is the executive director of GreenFaith, an international interfaith environmental organization. He has developed a range of innovative programs to make GreenFaith a global leader in the religious-environmental movement. In recent years, he coordinated the OurVoices campaign that mobilized religious support globally for COP 21 and led the organizing efforts of faith communities for the People’s Climate Marches in New York City and Washington D.C. He helped lead the faith-based fossil fuel divestment movement and supported the launch of the global Interfaith Rainforest Initiative. Harper also co-founded Shine, a faith-philanthropy-NGO campaign to end energy poverty with renewable energy by 2030. He is the author of GreenFaith: Mobilizing God’s People to Protect the Earth.

February 21: Julia Olson

Julia Olson graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1993 with a B.A. in International Affairs and from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, with a J.D. in 1997. Julia worked for 15 years representing grassroots conservation groups in the West. She helped protect rivers, forests, parks, wilderness, wildlife, organic agriculture, and human health. After becoming a mother, and realizing the greatest threat to her children and children everywhere was climate change, she began focusing her work in that field and founded Our Children's Trust, where she is executive director and chief legal counsel. Her work has led her to the intersection of human rights and environmental protection and she is passionate about working for youth. Julia also teaches environmental courses as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon School of Law.

February 28: Robin Bronen

Robin Bronen lives in Alaska, works as a human rights attorney, and has been working on the climate-forced relocation of Alaska Native communities since 2007. She is currently working with 15 Alaska Native communities to design and implement community-based adaptation strategies, including community relocation, that protect their human rights. She is also the co-founder and executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, a nonprofit agency that is the only immigration legal service provider in Alaska. The Institute houses a Language Interpreter Center that trains bilingual Alaskans to be professional interpreters, and it is also a research and policy institute focused on climate justice issues. The Alaska Bar Association awarded Robin the 2007 Robert Hickerson Public Service award and the 2012 International Human Rights award. The Federal Bureau of Investigation awarded the Alaska Institute for Justice the 2012 FBI Director’s Community Service award for its work with human trafficking survivors and the International Soroptimist’s awarded her the 2012 Advancing the Rights of Women award.

March 7: Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the "alternative Nobel." His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized 20,000 rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.

March 14: Stephen Trimble

A writer, photographer, and editor, Stephen Trimble has published 25 books, including Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America, The People: Indians of the American Southwest, and Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands. He has taught writing at the University of Utah, served as board chair of Utah Interfaith Power & Light, and currently serves on the advisory board of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. The breadth of Trimble’s awards mirrors the wide embrace of his work: The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation; a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellowship at the University of Utah Tanner Humanities Center; The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award; and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College, honoring his efforts to increase our understanding of Western landscapes and peoples.

March 21: Debra Marquart

Debra Marquart is the author of five books, including Small Buried Things: Poems, and a co-edited anthology of experimental writing, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Prose Sequence. She teaches nonfiction in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. The senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Marquart has delivered over 250 invited readings and keynotes at universities and conferences from New York and Washington to Greece and Ireland. Her work has been featured on three NPR programs—Morning Edition, The Writer’s Almanac, and On Point—and the BBC. She is the recipient of more than 50 grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Nonfiction Award, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. Her environmental poem “Lament” was recently honored by inclusion in Best American Poetry 2016.

March 28: Jacqueline Patterson

Currently the Director of Environmental and Climate Justice at the NAACP, Jacqueline Patterson, MSW, MPH, has worked on international and domestic issues including gender justice, racial justice, economic justice, and environmental and climate justice, with organizations including Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, IMA World Health, United for a Fair Economy, ActionAid, Health GAP, and the organization she co-founded, Women of Color United. She also currently serves on the Boards of Directors for the Institute of the Black World, Center for Story Based Strategy, the National Black Workers’ Center, Fresh Coast Capital, the Center for Sustainable Climate Solutions, the River Network, and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, as well as on the Steering Committee for Interfaith Moral Action on Climate Change. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for Earth Ethics and the Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity Initiative. 

April 4: Anthony Ingraffea

Dr. Ingraffea is the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University. His research concentrates on simulation and physical testing of complex fracturing processes. He has authored with his students over 250 papers in these areas. For his research achievements in hydraulic fracturing, he won the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics “1994 Significant Paper Award,” and twice won the National Research Council Award for Research in Rock Mechanics. In 2006, he won ASTM’s George Irwin Medal for outstanding research in fracture mechanics. In 2011, TIME Magazine named him one of its “People Who Mattered,” and he became the first president of Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy. He is co-author of recent papers on methane emissions, wellbore integrity, and conversion of New York and California to wind/sun/water power for all energy uses in the next few decades.

April 11: Jacqueline Keeler

Jacqueline Keeler is a Diné/Ihanktonwan Dakota writer and activist. She has contributed to High Country News, The Nation, Yes! magazine, and many other publications. Her book Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears is available from Torrey House Press and her forthcoming title Standing Rock to the Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Occupation, Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Lands will be released later in 2018.

April 18: Kyle Powys Whyte

Kyle Whyte is the Timnick Chair in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. He is also a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. His research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

April 25: Josh Fox

Josh Fox is best known as the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning writer/director of Gasland Parts I and II. He is internationally recognized as a spokesperson and leader on the issue of fracking and extreme energy development. His new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, won the Environmental Advocacy Award at the Washington D.C. Environmental Film Festival, and was released on HBO. As the Founder and Artistic Director of International WOW Company, Fox has established himself as a significant force in New York theatre. His work for the stage includes Surrender, an interactive war epic that was nominated for a 2009 Drama Desk Award and AUTO DA FE. The performance premiered in New York and toured to Japan in 2011.

May 2: Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development, renewable energy, and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two-time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.
As executive director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with indigenous communities. And in her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation-based, nonprofit organizations in the country, and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable-development strategies, renewable energy, and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

May 9: David James Duncan

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story/memoir/essay collections River Teeth, My Story as Told by Water, and God Laughs & Plays. He has also written two fast-response activist books, Citizen’s Dissent (with Wendell Berry) and The Heart of the Monster (with Rick Bass). His work has won three Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Awards, the Western States Book Award, a Lannan Fellowship, and the American Library Association’s 2003 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom, and it has appeared in more than 40 anthologies including Best American Sports Writing, Best American Essays (twice), and Best American Spiritual Writing (five times). He is currently finishing up a novel, Sun House, that fuses his love for acoustic folk and blues music and the mountains, river valleys, wild creatures, and openhearted people of the American West. The closed hearted are on their own.

May 23: Mary Wood

Mary Christina Wood is a Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon and the Faculty Director of the law school's nationally acclaimed Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. She is an award-winning professor and the co-author of leading textbooks on public trust law and natural resources law. Her most recent book, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, sets forth a new paradigm of ecological responsibility. She originated the legal theory called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, which seeks to hold governments accountable to reduce carbon pollution within their jurisdictions. Professor Wood’s research is being used in cases brought on behalf of youth throughout the world. She is a frequent speaker on climate issues and has received national and international attention for her sovereign trust approach to global climate policy.

May 30: Anna Grear

Anna Grear is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, founder of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), founder of the Vulnerability Network, and co-founder, with Martha Fineman, of the Vulnerability and Human Condition Collaboration (a partnership between UWE and Emory University, Atlanta). Anna is a legal theorist whose work focuses largely on questions related to law’s construction of the human being and the human relationship with the world, broadly conceived. Her work calls on insights from a range of disciplines despite being firmly located within a combination of critical legal theory and jurisprudence. She is also series editor of a new series called Law, Justice and Ecology recently established by Glasshouse Press.