through creative practice

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent books include A WOVEN WORLD: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress, the poetry collection Stairway to Heaven and Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom. The essay collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit was published in 2014. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Science and Other Poems, and is winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is a writer and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council. 

Augusta Savage Gallery

Augusta Savage Gallery, located in New Africa House at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a multicultural and multiarts facility. Named in honor of renowned sculptor Augusta Savage, the Gallery was founded in 1970 by the Afro-American Studies Department. Its mission is to promote artistic works from a broad spectrum of cultures. Exhibits are selected for their aesthetic integrity and their ability to enlighten the viewer on such issues as race, ethnicity, class, and cultural identity.

Alexia Cota is the Associate Director of Augusta Savage Gallery and a member of the CUHF UMass Amherst Council. 

Bobbe Besold

Bobbe Besold is an artist working in all media, including photography, film, performance, visual art, writing and public art. She is a creative catalyst and a community collaborator, whose work focuses on ecological and social issues.

Bobbe Besold is a member of the CUHF Santa Fe Council. 

Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, TIME, The New York Times Sunday magazine, Newsweek, Outside, among many others. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow, Stanford Knight Fellow as well as a Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow.

Camille Seaman is an independent photographer and a member of the CUHF National Council.

ClimateCultures

ClimateCultures is an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. It’s a network of artists, curators and researchers working across many practices, venues and disciplines. It builds creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward.

Wallace Heim is a member of ClimateCultures and a CUHF Edinburgh Council member.

Collins and Goto Studio

Reiko Goto and Tim Collins are environmental artists, working together since 1985. They have developed a unique and interdisciplinary practice that combines art, ecology and social engagement. Their work centers on natural public places and everyday experiences of environmental commons. It is infused with an ethical-aesthetic impulse, and aims to create opportunities for reflection, dialogue and action.

Reiko Goto is a member of the CUHF Edinburgh Council.

Curt Newton

Curt Newton currently performs with Pocket Aces, the Eric Hofbauer Quintet, Explorers Club, and on solo drumset. In December 2022, Eric Hofbauer’s Five Agents premiered a new work entitled Waking Up, inspired by and structured around climate activist Greta Thunberg’s galvanizing 2019 “How Dare You!” speech at the UN. A studio recording is now in production, to be released in 2023.

Curt Newton, a drummer, has been working in the Boston jazz and improvised music scene since the mid-1980s. He is a CUHF National Convener and a member of the MIT Council.

Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau writes about the intersection of social and environmental justice, through the lens of parenthood. Since the publication of the 2018 IPCC report, she has been writing exclusively about the climate crisis. She is a founding member of Writers Rebel, NYC, an Extinction Rebellion group. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and LitHub, her bylines also include the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Believer. Her books include The Professor’s Daughter, a novel, and Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award in nonfiction. Her third book, Lessons for Survival, is forthcoming. Raboteau lives with her family in the Bronx and teaches creative writing in Harlem as a professor at the City College of New York.

Emily Raboteau is a writer and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

Good Earth Multimedia Series

The Good Earth photo and video series features New Mexican agrarians who are revitalizing land through regenerative practices—building soil, sequestering carbon, reducing toxins, and improving the health of people, plants and animals.

Esha Chiocchio is a photographer and environmental educator and a member of the CUHF Santa Fe Council.

Kathleen Dean Moore

For many years, Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., was a prize-winning nature writer and professor of environmental ethics at Oregon State University. But her alarm at the growing climate and extinction crises led to her leave academia, so she could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of action. Her first climate ethics book was Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (co-edited by Michael Nelson, foreword by Desmond Tutu). More recent books are Great Tide Rising, Earth’s Wild Music, Bearing Witness, and now the illustrated Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers. Kathleen often works with music and film, having written the scripts for and performed in several short films produced by the Spring Creek Project, where she is a Senior Fellow.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, a member of the CUHF National Council and co-host of the Journalists & Writers Council.

Meehan Crist

Meehan Crist is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Nation, Scientific American, and Science, and was selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. She is co-editor of What Future 2018 (Unnamed Press), a founding member of NeuWrite, and the host of Convergence: a show about the future. Her nonfiction book about the climate crisis, Is It OK to Have a Child?, is forthcoming from Random House in the US and Chatto & Windus in the UK.

Meehan Crist is a writer and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

The Mending Library

The Mending Library extends the life of clothing by providing the tools, supplies, resources, and inspiration people need to repair and rewear their clothes. From visible mending to remixed fashion—sewing is creative, thrifty, sustainable, therapeutic, and fun.

Phoebe Schenker is an architect and exhibit designer and a member of the CUHF Bay Area Council.

Mera Publications

Mera Publications is a Canadian-owned and operated company registered in Nepal. They produce books on the region and do contract work for international agencies and non-governmental organizations working in Nepal to produce publications including training manuals, lessons learn documentation, and annual reports.

Frances Klatzel is a writer, photographer, and founder of Mera Publications. She is the Steady Council Anchor for the CUHF Kathmandu Council.

Michelle Nijhuis

A self-described “lapsed biologist”, writer Michelle Nijhuis specializes in stories about conservation and global change. Her book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a critical history of the modern conservation movement, was published by W.W. Norton in March 2021 and was named one of the best books of 2021 by the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, Booklist, and other publications. She is a project editor at The Atlantic, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a longtime contributing editor at High Country News. Her writing has appeared in publications including National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine.

Michelle Nijhuis is a writer and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

M.R. O’Connor

M. R. O’Connor is a journalist who writes about the politics and ethics of science, technology and conservation. Her work has appeared online in The Atavist, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Nautilus, UnDark and Harper’s. Her first book, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) and was one of Library Journal and Amazon’s Best Books of The Year. Her second book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) is an exploration of navigation traditions, neuroscience, and the diversity of human relationships to space, time and memory. Its writing was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan’s Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, & Economics. She is currently writing a book called Ignition (September 2023, Bold Type Books) on fire ecology and prescribed burning, for which she became certified as a wildland firefighter.

M.R. O’Connor is a writer and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

Ocean Country

Ocean Country: One Woman’s Journey from Peril to Hope in Her Quest to Save the Seas, is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas. But most importantly, it is the story of finding true hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind. Published by Atlantic Books (2015).

Liz Cunningham writes and speaks about conservation and the spiritual awareness we need to engage our planetary crises. She is a member of the CUHF Eco-Sattva 3 Council.

Orion Magazine

Orion magazine invites readers into a community of caring for the planet. Through writing and art that explore the connection between nature and culture, Orion inspires new thinking about how humanity might live on Earth justly, sustainably, and joyously.

Amy Brady is the Executive Director of Orion and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

Paperbark

Paperbark—an interdisciplinary print and digital magazine—was developed by a visionary group of faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is a collaboration between the School of Earth and Sustainability, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the UMass Libraries. Paperbark is committed to the obligations of a liveable future nurtured through collaboration across generations and fields of thought. Rooted in stewardship and creative possibility, Paperbark gathers stories of ecologies in crisis—as well as stories of life’s flourishing intricacies.

Noy Holland is the Faculty Advisor to Paperbark and Jennifer Jacobson is Co-Chairperson of the Advisory Board; both are members of the CUHF UMass Amherst Council.

SeedBroadcast Collective

SeedBroadcast is a collaborative project exploring bioregional agri-Culture and seed action through collective inquiries and hands-on creative practices. SeedBroadcast holds the belief that it is a human right to save seeds and share their gifts, to grow food and share its abundance, and to cultivate grassroots wisdom and share its creativity.

Chrissie Orr is the Founder of SeedBroadcast and a member of the CUHF Santa Fe Council.

The Spring Creek Project

The Spring Creek Project brings together the practical wisdom of environmental science, the clarity of philosophy, and the transformational power of the written word and the arts to envision and inspire just and joyous relations with the planet and with one another.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Spring Creek Project and a member of the CUHF National Council and the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.

Studio Echelman

Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Echelman’s work defies categorization, as it intersects Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Echelman’s art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.”

Janet Echelman is a visual artist and a member of the CUHF National Council.

Undark Magazine

As part of its mission to promote excellence in science journalism, the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT publishes the digital science magazine, Undark, which reaches millions of readers annually. Undark’s journalism has been anthologized in the “Best American Science and Nature Writing” book series, and the magazine’s work is routinely republished by some of the world’s most respected media outlets. The magazine, renowned for its rigorous and comprehensive fact-checking process, has won numerous awards for its journalism.

Deborah Blum is the Founding Publisher of Undark and a member of the CUHF Journalists & Writers Council.