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.
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.