ASLE extended honorary memberships to three amazing women in 2014. Recipients were chosen for this honor, which includes lifetime membership in ASLE and all its benefits, because of their contributions to ASLE and/or literature and environmental studies. They have significantly enriched those familiar with their work, and their exemplary careers as artists, advocates, and environmental role models has inspired us all. The new inductees will be honored at the opening reception of our 2015 biennial conference at the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID.
Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., is a philosopher, environmental advocate, and award-winning essayist, best known for her books about our cultural and spiritual relation to the natural world–among them, Riverwalking, Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. She is co-editor of books about Rachel Carson, Mount St. Helens, and the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova. Her most recent book is Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, which gathers testimony from the world’s moral leaders about our obligations to the future. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Oregon State University, she speaks across the country about the moral urgency of stopping the carbon catastrophe. Her next book is Why It’s Wrong to Wreck the World: A Book of Love and Anger. Moore is co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Spring Creek Project, and a member of the board of Orion magazine. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and writes from a cabin on the shore of an Alaskan island, where two creeks and a bear trail meet a tidal cove.
Other books by Ray include Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (2003), focusing on rural community, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (2005), the story of a 750,000-acre wildland between south Georgia and north Florida, A House of Branches (2010), her first book of poetry which won a Southern Booksellers Award for Poetry 2011, and Drifting Into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (2011), a lovesong to the river of her childhood and a call to action to protect it.
The author is visiting professor and writer-in-residence at universities and colleges across the county. At home in southern Georgia, Ray attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on Red Earth Farm with her husband and daughter. Ray is an organic gardener, tender of farm animals, slow-food cook, and seed-saver. She lectures nationally on nature, community, agriculture, seeds, wildness, sustainability, and the politics of wholeness.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, writer and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students, and to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge.
Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi. Her writings include Gathering Moss, which incorporates both traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives and was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. She has served as writer in residence at Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, the Sitka Center, and others. Her second book, Braiding Sweetgrass: renewing reciprocity with the good green earth, focuses on the subject of living in reciprocity with land. Her literary essays appear in Whole Terrain, Adirondack Life, Orion, and several anthologies. She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America.
