2009-1998 Residents - Mesa Refuge

Spring 2009

Session 1:
• Tanya Dawkins, Coral Gables, FL
• Erik Mueggler, Ann Arbor, MI
• Susan Schacht, Oakland, CA

Session 2:
• Eugene Coyle, Berkeley, CA
• Elaine Elinson, San Francisco, CA
• Tom McNamee, San Francisco, CA

Session 3:
• Dennis Bernstein, Berkeley, CA
• Eugene Linden, Irvington, NY
• Richard Parker, Cambridge, MA

Fall 2009

Session 4:
• Vanessa Huang, Oakland, CA
• Wolfgang Sachs, Wuppertal, Germany
• Bryant Terry, Oakland, CA

Session 5:
• Jeff Conant, Berkeley, CA
• Jeff Greenwald, Berkeley, CA
• Alexander Lee, Concord, NH

Session 6:
• Andrea Godshalk, Jamaica Plain, MA
• Kathleen Harrison, Occidental, CA
• Margaret Paloma Pavel, Oakland, CA

Fall 2008

Robert M. Abbott, Calgary, Alberta

Robert Abbott is a business and NGO consultant specializing in sustainability
strategies. A core focus of his current work is helping energy and resources
firms worldwide make the transition to a less carbon intensive economy. He is
the author of Uncommon Cents: Thoreau and the Nature of Business, and the
forthcoming (2009) Conscious Endeavors: Essays on Business, Society and the
Journey to Sustainability. While at the Mesa Refuge, Rob will be working on his
next project, a meditation on the evolution of the city provisionally titled
Where We Live: Chasing the Dream of Urban Sustainability.

Monette Tangren Clark, Moab, UT

Monette Clark is a consultant providing writing, editing, and desktop
publishing services. Since 2001, she has been literary assistant to author
Terry Tempest Williams. At Mesa Clark will be working on a memoir of her
hometown, Moab, in southeast Utah. Her memoir will combine the history of her
pioneer ancestors, her own story of growing up in Moab’s biggest junkyard, and
reflections on the environ¬mental degradation that has occurred since white
settlers arrived in the 1870s.

Charlie Cray, Washington, DC

Charlie Cray is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling
Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), as well as
numerous articles about war profiteering, corporate crime, environmental
justice, and pollution pre¬vention. After working with Greenpeace for ten
years, he jump-started his writing career as associate editor of Multinational
Monitor magazine. At Mesa he will work on a new book to be published by Oxford
University Press.

Kim Eisele, Tucson, AZ

Kimi Eisele is a writer, dancer, choreographer, and educator. She conducts
com¬munity dance projects and writes about issues related to globalization,
U.S-Mexico border issues, the environment, the food system and the arts. She is
currently at work on a novel about a post-apocalyptic U.S. landscape and
various strategies of adaptation and survival amidst severe economic and
environmental change.

Vanessa Huang, Oakland, CA

Vanessa Huang is a writer, filmmaker, and community organizer. Vanessa was the
campaign and communications director for Justice Now and wrote a quarterly news
column for ColorLines magazine. At Mesa, Vanessa will work on a project about
the California prison system and her recent legislative work challenging
“gender responsive” prison expansion in California’s central valley.

Amy L. Jenkins, Wauwatosa, WI

Amy L. Jenkins is a writer whose work has recently appeared in the Seal Press
anthology, The Maternal is Political, Earth Island Journal and The Florida
Review. She teaches writing at Carroll University. At Mesa she will be working
on a book about legacies of Aldo Leopold.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Syracuse, NY

Robin Kimmerer is a professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State
University of New York and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the
Environment. She has published numerous articles in environmental, science and
literary journals. Her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of
Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003) received the 2005 John Burroughs
Medal for outstanding natural history writing. At Mesa she will be working on
Stories of Reciprocity, looking at reciprocal relationships in nature as a
model for sustainable human and ecological communities.

Jimmy Langman, Matthews, NC

Jimmy Langman is a freelance journalist based in Chile. He has written on
environmental, Latin American and other issues for Newsweek, The Nation and
other publications. At the Mesa Refuge, he will be working on a book about
environmental change and development conflicts in Patagonia.

Karen Litfin, Seattle, WA

Karen Litfin is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Washing¬ton in Seattle. She has published two books and many articles on global
environ¬mental politics. Having visited 15 ecovillages on 5 continents, she is
writing a book about the emergence of a holistic consciousness in the global
ecovillage movement.

Nicole McClelland, San Francisco, CA

Nicole McClelland is a staff writer and copy editor at Mother Jones magazine.
At Mesa McClelland will be working on a book about the Burmese refugee crisis
and the uncrushable spirit of ethnic Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Alexandra Murphy, Lincoln, VT

Alexandra Murphy is a freelance writer whose work focuses on connecting people
and place. For six years, she served as director of education for Vermont
Family Forests, which inspired the book she’ll be working on at Mesa Refuge.
Re-wilding the Working Landscape: First Lessons from a Self-willed Family
Forest will explore ways to cultivate a sustainable, soulful relationship with
forests.

Deborah Richie Oberbillig, Missoula, MT

Deborah Richie Oberbillig is natural history writer and author of a 2008
children’s book, Bird Feats of Montana. Her writing ranges from interpretive
exhibits, articles and brochures to handbooks on open space and wildlife
viewing. At Mesa, she will work on a creative nonfiction book entitled Halcyon:
A Kingfisher’s Guide to Acts of Daily Wonder.

Margaret Paloma Pavel, Oakland, CA

Paloma Pavel is president of Earth House Center – dedicated to building
healthy, just, and sustainable communities through multi-racial leadership
development, strategic communications and media tools. At Mesa Refuge, Pavel is
completing her second book Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability with
Justice in the Next American Metropolis, to be published by MIT Press.

Jonathan Schechter, Jackson, WY

Jonathan Schechter is the founder and executive director of the Charture
Institute, a Jackson, WY-based think tank focusing on issues of growth and
change in commu¬ni¬ties located in beautiful natural settings. At Mesa he will
work on a book about sustainability efforts in Jackson Hole and the Tetons.

Marina Sitrin, San Francisco, CA

Marina Sitrin is a San Francisco-based writer, teacher and activist. She is the
editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, an oral history
of the autonomous social movements in Argentina. She is currently working on a
book entitled Insurgent Democracies: Latin America’s New Powers.

Alison Swan, Suagatuck, MI

Alison Swan is a co-winner, with her husband David Swan, of the Michigan
Envi¬ron¬mental Council’s Petoskey Prize for Grassroots Environmental
Leadership; creator and editor of Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great
Lakes; and advisory board member of the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance. Her
poetry and prose have appeared in many publications. She is at work on a
book-length essay about the Saugatuck Dunes, a mostly wild stretch of Lake
Michigan’s eastern shore under immediate threat of development.

Nina Wise, San Rafael, CA

Nina Wise is a writer, performance artist and educator. Her book, A Big New
Free Happy Unusual Life was published by Broadway Books in 2002. She is
currently working on a play entitled The Kepler Project: When Science Lost the
Soul in collaboration with Ralph Abraham. The play is about a contemporary
astronomer who runs into professional and personal challenges due to her
radical notion of the nature of the universe: that it is coherent, intelligent,
interconnected.

Margaret Wrinkle, Oakland, CA

Margaret Wrinkle is a writer and filmmaker from Birmingham, Alabama. Her
award-winning documentary film on race was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition.
She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute while finishing a novel based on
the relationship between an ancestor of hers and a West African man he held as
a slave. At Mesa, she will work on a non-fiction account of her own personal
journey through the tangled racial landscape of the American South.

Irene Zabytko, Apopka, FL

Irene Zabytko is the author of the novel, The Sky Unwashed, based on the lives
of elderly residents still living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. She is
currently filming two documentaries featuring Chernobyl inhabitants: Life in
the Dead Zone and Epiphany at Chornobyl. At Mesa, she will be writing a
companion book of essays.

Spring/Summer 2008

David Bacon, Berkeley, CA

David Bacon has been a writer and documentary photographer for 15 years,
covering issues of labor, immigration and international politics. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for The Nation and The Progressive, among other publications. For twenty years, Bacon was a labor and
immigrant rights organizer. Bacon was board chair of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and helped organize the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network and the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health. He wrote The Children of NAFTA (University of California Press, March, 2004). At Mesa he worked on Living Under the Trees, in which he photographs and interviews Mexican migrants working in California’s fields. He also worked on Illegal People and The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2008 and 2013).

Lawrence Bogad, Berkeley, CA

Bogad (Associate Professor, University of California at Davis) is a scholar and
writer/performer focusing on the intersection between art and activism. His
book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, is an
international study of performance artists who run for public office as a
prank. Bogad will be working on his next book, Serious Play, which examines the
use of satire and theatrics in nonviolent activism.

Ray Boshara, Washington, DC

Ray Boshara is Vice President, Domestic Policy Programs, at the New America
Foundation, a think-tank in Washington, DC. He is a recognized expert on
savings and asset ownership strategies for low-income persons in the U.S. and
abroad. He is working on a book entitled The Next Progressive Era with Phil
Longman.

Elizabeth Bruhn Catalan, N. Las Vegas, NV

Raised in St. George, Utah, Ms. Catalan witnessed first-hand the beginnings of
atomic testing in Nevada. She has testified and written about the effects of
the testing. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on an historically-based novel
dealing with people living downwind from the testsite.

Chris Colin, San Francisco, CA

Chris Colin is the author of What Really Happened to the Class of ’93, and has
written about chimpanzee culture, eco cities and ethnic cleansing for the New
York Times, Smithsonian and Mother Jones. At Mesa he’ll write about the human
dimensions of San Francisco’s gentrification crisis.

Robert Collier, Berkeley, CA

Robert Collier is a visiting scholar at the Center for Environmental Public
Policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. He is writing a book
on China’s role in global warming, to be published by University of California
Press. Before taking his position at UC Berkeley, he was a reporter for 16
years for the San Francisco Chronicle, specializing most recently on global
energy trends and climate change.

Ariane Conrad, San Francisco, CA

Ariane Conrad is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience in
nonprofit communications, messaging, and fundraising. Her work is included in
the LiP magazine anthology Tipping the Sacred Cow, and she has just sold a book
about hula hooping for healing and wellness to Workman Press. At Mesa she will
be finalizing the manuscript of Van Jones’ forthcoming book The Green Collar
Economy, which she researched and helped develop.

Milagros De Guzman, San Francisco, CA

Milagros De Guzman is a freelance writer and editor. She has almost two decades
of experience as a community activist and recently started a writing workshop
for Filipino seniors at the Canon Kip Senior Center in San Francisco. She will
devote her time at Mesa Refuge working on her book Sisters in Struggle, Sisters
in Victory about women’s leadership in Philippine social justice movements.

Linda Faillace, Warren, VT

Linda Faillace is the author of Mad Sheep: The True Story behind the USDA’s War
on a Family Farm. A champion of organic and sustainable farming, farmer’s
rights, and strong local communities, Linda will work on her second book, The
Right to Eat: The Next Civil Rights Movement.

Bill Gallegos, Huntington Park, CA

Bill Gallegos, the executive director of Communities for a Better Environment
(CBE), has more than 30 years of experience as a social justice activist. CBE
helps communities of color fight disproportionate burdens of pollution and
injustice, and has won landmark regulations to improve air quality. Bill will
be writing a booklet, Building A Transformative Economy in California, that
will address climate change, public health and alternative energy, all within
the context of creating a green economy.

Andrea Godshalk, Amherst, MA

Andrea works in the local food movement and with youth leadership development.
Her writing has been published in LOUDmouth, The Resister, The Bullhorn and The
Rocky Mountain Chronicle. . At Mesa Andrea will be working on a book about
urban farming organizations which are creating meaningful jobs and nourishing
food.

Lisa M. Hamilton, Mill Valley, CA

Writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton focuses on stories of farmers and
ranchers. She has written and photographed for many publications, including The
Nation, National Geographic Traveler, Orion and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Lisa’s first book, Farming to Create Heaven on Earth, explores the Japanese
spiritual farming and food movement called Natural Agriculture. Her current
work is a narrative non-fiction book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in
the Age of Agribusiness, to be published by Counterpoint Press in 2009.

Caspar Henderson, Oxford, UK

Caspar Henderson is writing The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century
Bestiary. Through a series of animal portraits, the book will explore animal
and human being at a time of environmental crisis. Caspar lives in Oxford,
England. His previous books include Our Fragile World (Thames & Hudson,
2005) and Debating Globalization (Polity, 2005).

Mark Hertsgaard, San Francisco, CA

Mark Hertsgaard covers climate change for leading magazines around the world,
including Vanity Fair, L’espresso, Time and The Nation. He is the author of
five books that have been translated into 16 languages. At Mesa Refuge he will
be working on his next book, Living Through the Storm: Surviving the Next 50
Years of Climate Change.

Josh Kun, Los Angeles, CA

Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications and the
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern
California. He writes about culture, the arts, and music for The New York
Times, Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and is the author of
Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press). At Mesa, he will be working on
a book about Tijuana, Mexico and the impact of borderlines on ecologies of
culture.

Jeff Lustig, Berkeley, CA

Jeff Lustig is Professor of Government at California State University
Sacramento. He is author of Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern
American Political Thought, 1890-1920, and articles on politics, political
thought and the corporatization of higher education. At Mesa Refuge he will
work on a book about The Failure of Representation and Crisis of California
Politics, and need for a new constitutional convention.

Barry C. Lynn, Washington, DC

Barry C. Lynn is a senior fellow and director of the Markets, Enterprise, and
Security program at the New America Foundation in Washington. He has written on
international industry, trade, politics, and the environment for more than two
decades, and is author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the
Global Corporation (2005). At Mesa, he will work on a book about the economic
and political effects of the massive consolidation of power that has taken
place in the industries on which Americans rely for our food, clothing,
machines, and services.

Wendy McLaughlin, Point Reyes Station, CA

Wendy McLaughlin is a radio producer and documentary filmmaker. At Mesa Refuge
she will be working on her a book about Warren Weber, a pioneer of the organic
farming movement in California.

Erik Mueggler, Ann Arbor, MI

Erik Mueggler is a cultural anthropologist who works with ethnic minorities who
live in the mountains of Southwest China. He is the author of The Age of Wild
Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China. At Mesa, he is working
on a book about botanical exploration in China and Tibet.

Ruth Needleman, Gary, IN

Ruth Needleman is a professor of Labor Studies at Indiana University, where her
research focuses on worker education as a path to engaged citizenship. She is
currently completing research on social change educaton in Brazil.. During her
weeks at the Mesa Refuge, she will be developing a book proposal on
transformational education for adults.

Tram Nguyen, Oakland, CA

Tram Nguyen was formerly the Executive Editor of ColorLines magazine. She is
the author of We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant
Communities After 9/11, and the forthcoming Language is a Place of Struggle:
Great Quotes by Americans of Color. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on a
project about guestworkers and the U.S. immigration debate.

Nancy Nichols, Belmont, MA

Nancy Nichols is a writer, editor and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in the
Harvard Business Review, the Chicago Tribune and theNew York Times Book Review.
At Mesa she will be working on her book, Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s
Toxic Legacy, which will be published by Island Press.

Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco, CA

Jeremy Adam Smith is senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The
Daddy Shift, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Spring 2009. Jeremy is also
co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct: Essays on the Science of a Meaningful
Life. His essays, short stories, and articles on parenting, popular culture,
urban life, and politics have appeared in Mothering, The Nation, San Francisco
Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Utne Reader, Wired, and numerous other
periodicals and books.

Cora Stryker, Berkeley, CA

Cora Stryker is a former tropical field biologist and urban gardener. At Mesa
Refuge she will be working on her first novel, Manzanita, about resillience and
survival in the post-petroleum era. Set in San Francisco, the novel will
explore changes in urban landscapes, economy, ecology, and social relations
following the decline of the petroleum-based economy.

Bryant Terry, Berkeley, CA

Bryant Terry is an eco-chef, food justice activist, and 2008-2010 Food and
Society Policy Fellow. Over the past seven years, he has committed himself to
feeding people and illuminating the connections between poverty, food
insecurity, and institutional racism. He is the co-author with Anna Lappé of
Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. At Mesa Refuge, Bryant will be
working on a cookbook that reclaims the rich, diverse, and “green” culinary
traditions of African Americans.

Eric Tipler, Washington, DC

Eric Tipler has spent the last three years teaching high school, first in the
suburbs and then in the inner-city of Washington, DC. At Mesa he will work on a
memoir exploring how public schools perpetuate social inequality and how we can
break that cycle.

Sandy Tolan, Los Angeles, CA

Sandy Tolan is author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the
Middle East, written in part at Mesa Refuge, and a 2006 finalist for a National
Books Critics Circle Award. He has reported from more than 30 countries,
focusing on the intersection of land, water, ethnic identity, and the global
economy. At Mesa Refuge in 2008, Sandy will be writing about water, power and
concrete in California and the American Southwest.

Ayelet Waldman, Berkeley, CA

Ayelet Waldman is the author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and
Daughter’s Keeper. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The
Guardian, Vogue, Elle, More, Allure, Child and many other magazines and
newspapers.

Brooke Williams, Moose, WY

Brooke Williams is a writer and consultant to businesses, local governments and
non-profit organizations on issues of management, social entrepreneurship, and
compatible economic development. He has authored Utah: A Celebration of the
Landscape; Halflives: Reconciling Work, Wildness; and The Escalante: The Best
Kind of Nothing. He is currently writing about the connection between wildness
and sustainability.

Josh Wilson, San Francisco, CA

Josh Wilson is a San Francisco writer and editor with a background in
commercial and nonprofit media. He is a former editor at SFGate.com, and a
co-founder of Independent Arts & Media, a nonprofit producer’s co-op and
media/culture incubator. At Mesa Refuge, he will be writing a long-form essay
series on public media, independent culture and “the dialogue of
democracy.”

Jennifer Wolch, L.A., CA

Jennifer Wolch writes about nature in the city and the challenges of
sustainable urbanism. Her Mesa Refuge project focuses on the global “carbon
hoofprint” and links between human diet, society-animal relations, climate
change and ethics.

Spring / Summer 2007

Melvin Adams, Richland, WA

Melvin Adams is a retired senior scientist living in Richland Washington. In
addition to numerous technical papers on nuclear waste disposal, Mr. Adams is
the author of Netting the Sun: A Personal Geography of the Oregon Desert
published by Washington State University Press. At Mesa he will be working on a
new book entitled Lost in the Garden with Eve: Searching for the Numinous in
Nature.

Erik Assadourian, Washington, DC

Erik Assadourian is a research associate at Worldwatch Institute and the
director of Vital Signs, Worldwatch’s annual book on the trends that are
shaping our future. His areas of interest include the consumer society,
corporate responsibility, sustain¬able communities, and cultural change. Most
recently, he authored “Transforming Corporations,” an analysis of corporate
responsibility for State of the World 2006. At Mesa, Erik will be writing a
chapter for State of the World 2008 entitled “Building Sustainable
Communities.”

Brian Awehali, Oakland, CA

Brian Awehali founded, edited, then folded, LiP: Informed Revolt, an
award-winning magazine devoted to radical politics, culture, sex and humor. At
the Mesa Refuge, he’ll be working on Good-Bye!: Honest Obituaries for a
Dishonest World, a darkly humorous radical political history presented in the
form of a rogues’ gallery.

Louis Blumberg, San Francisco, CA

Louis Blumberg directs the California Forest Policy for The Nature Conservancy,
working to promote landscape-scale conservation of forests in California on
both private and public lands. He is co-author, with Robert Gottlieb, of War On
Waste: Can America Win its Battle with Garbage?, Island Press, 1989. At Mesa he
will work on a project to evaluate the degree of social license for sustainable
forestry.

Rebecca Clarren, Portland, OR

Rebecca Clarren, a former editor at High Country News, is a freelance
journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She writes about natural resources and
labor issues for a variety of national magazines such as Salon.com, Orion, The
Nation, Ms and The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. While at the Mesa Refuge
she will be working on a series of essays about how a natural gas boom is
reshaping parts of rural America.

Michael Dear, Los Angeles, CA

Michael Dear is professor of geography at the University of Southern California
and University College, London. His research focuses on the future of cities,
and recent publications include ‘The Postmodern Urban Condition’ (2000), and
‘Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California’ (2003). At Mesa he
will be working on a new book entitled When Suburbs Collide.

Tina Fields, Sebastopol, CA

Tina Fields is an ecopsychologist, storyteller and earth-based spiritual
practitioner who currently teaches Culture, Ecology, & Sustainable
Community at New College of CA. At Mesa she will begin work on her first book
about applied ecopsychology, helping the layperson joyfully cultivate “right
relationship” with the more-than-human world.

Natalie Goldberg, Santa Fe, NM

Natalie Goldberg is the author of ten books, including Writing Down the Bones,
and her most recent The Great Failure. She has just completed a film, Tangled
Up in Bob: Searching for Bob Dylan, with filmmaker Mary Feidt, exploring the
effect of the Iron Range, Dylan’s childhood home, on his creativity and
songwriting. At Mesa Goldberg will complete a book entitled Old Friend From Far
Away about learning to trust your experience and having the confidence to make
positive effort for the good.

Jeff Greenwald, Oakland, CA

Oakland-based Jeff Greenwald is the author of five travel books, including
Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World. He also serves as executive
director of Ethical Traveler, a global alliance of travelers dedicated to human
rights and environmental protection (www.ethicaltraveler.org). Jeff will use
his Mesa Refuge time to work on a book about island nations and the
environmental threats facing their reefs forests, and wildlife.

Van Jones, Oakland, CA

Van Jones, president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, is working to
combine solutions to America’s two biggest problems: social inequality and
environmental destruction. At Mesa Van will be working on his forthcoming book,
which calls for green economic development for urban America.

Jamie Lincoln Kitman, Nyack, NY

Jamie Lincoln Kitman’s multiple professions include work as a writer for
Automobile Magazine and Top Gear (UK), rock band management for They Might Be
Giants, and OK Go, and work as a lawyer. At Mesa, he plans to follow up his IRE
award-winning “The Secret History of Lead,” which appeared in The Nation and
concerned the introduction of lead into gasoline, by finishing a book on the
same subject for Simon & Schuster.

Diane MacEachern, Takoma Park, MD

Diane MacEachern is the founder and president of The World Women Want and the
website www.biggreenpurse.com, which focus on using the marketplace to protect
the environment. At Mesa Refuge, she’ll be working on her fourth book, Big
Green Purse: How Millions of Women Can Use Their Purchasing Power to Create a
Cleaner, Greener World.

Jack Manno, Syracuse, NY

Jack Manno is a professor in the faculty of environmental studies at the State
University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in
Syracuse. He has written books on the economics of sustainability and the
militarization of the US space program. At Mesa Jack will be working on several
pieces about commoditization and its impacts on environment and society, and
his work as an ally to Native communities.

Andi McDaniel, Minneapolis, MN

Andi McDaniel is a freelance writer focusing on the environment, health and
sustainability, with a particular emphasis on food issues. Recently returned
from extended travel in Central and South America, she will be spending her
Mesa Refuge residency working on a book of essays about finding nature in
unexpected places.

Josh Morsell, San Francisco, CA

Josh Morsell is a San Francisco-based writer and civil-rights paralegal. Josh
is the founding editor of the online literary magazine fireflyjournal.com. At Mesa
Refuge, Josh will be working on his first book about a bomb that exploded in
the car of Earth First! organizer Judi Bari in 1990.

Judith Nies, Cambridge, MA

Judith Nies is an author, editor and teacher. She is the author of Nine Women:
Portraits from the American Radical Tradition, a book on women activists, and
Native American History (Ballantine, 1996). Her latest book, The Girl I Left
Behind: A Narrative History of the 1960s, will be published in 2008. Her
writing at Mesa Refuge will focus on the expansion of the Black Mesa coal mine
and its impact on Wall Street and the natural world.

Donna Parson, New York, NY

Donna Parson has over twenty-five years experience building grassroots advocacy
organizations. She was formerly director of Connecticut Citizen Action and
Northeast Action, and field director of Public Campaign. Presently she is a
consultant for Demos, an advocacy center based in New York. Donna is writing a
novel about two Estonian women whose lives are caught up in economic, political
and social events beyond their control.

Katie Peterson, Via Dyer, NV

Katie Peterson is the Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College
where she has been teaching for the last year. She recently published a book of
poems entitled This One Tree. At Mesa she will be working on a series of essays
about the connection between landscape, social ethics and communication, based
upon her teaching experience at Deep Springs College.

Michael Pollan, Berkeley, CA

Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire,
Second Nature and A Place of My Own, and a contributing writer to the New York
Times Magazine. His writing has received numerous awards, and his articles have
been anthologized in Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing and
the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He is currently a professor of Journalism at
UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. While at Mesa he’ll work on a new
book tentatively titled In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the
Pleasures of Eating.

Naomi Rose, Oakland, CA

Naomi Rose is a writer, book developer and creator of “Writing from the Deeper
Self,” a consultation model designed to help writers discover their inspiration
and creativity. She is also the author of MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to
Money. At Mesa Naomi will be working on a new book titled The Blessings Ledger:
A Journey to Find the Union of Money and Compassion.

Michael Schut, Seattle, WA

Michael Schut is the editor of the award-winning Simpler Living, Compassionate
Life: A Christian Perspective and author of its twelve-week study-guide. He
also edited Food and Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread. Having served for 11
years on the staff of Earth Ministry, he now is an independent writer and
speaker, focusing on the nexus between faith, sustainability, economics and
justice. At Mesa he will work on a book that will assist people of faith in
addressing the idolatry of money and economic growth in the context of a finite
world.

William Shutkin, Peru, VT

William Shutkin is an attorney, educator, writer and social entrepreneur
dedicated to citizen activism, environmental protection and sustainable
development. His book, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy
in the Twenty-First Century, won the 2001 Best Book Award for Ecological and
Transformational Politics from the American Political Science Association. At
the Mesa Refuge, he plans to work on a volume of collected writings tentatively
entitled A Republic of Trees and Other Thoughts on People, Place and the
Planet.

Michael Stoll, San Francisco, CA

Michael Stoll is a journalism instructor at San Jose State University and
freelance writer who has written about the media industry, the environment and
politics. For four years he has written for Grade the News, a Bay Area-focused
media-monitoring project. Previously he was an editor and reporter at the San
Francisco Examiner, and a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the
Hartford Courant. At Mesa he will be writing about a new media model for
starting a daily newspaper that is both non¬profit and advertising free.

Kathleen Tarr, Anchorage, AK

Kathleen Tarr teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
At Mesa she will be working on her first book, Ocean Cape, a nonfiction
narrative about migration in all its realms: physical, intellectual and
spiritual.

Late Summer / Fall 2007

Beverly Bell, Albuquerque, NM

Beverly Bell is associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and
coordinator of Other Worlds, a multi-media education and organizing project.
Beverly has worked for 27 years as a writer, advocate, and organizer with
economic and social justice movements around the world. At Mesa Refuge, she
will be working on a book on gender, globalization, and just economies.

Lisa Bennett, San Francisco, CA

San Francisco-based writer Lisa Bennett is a former Harvard University fellow
and contributor to numerous books and magazines. At Mesa, she will be working
on a book entitled Why I Don’t Do Anything about Global Warming, a frank
exploration into why many Americans care deeply about the environment yet fail
to do anything serious about it.

Michael Dorsey, Hanover, NH

Dr. M.K. Dorsey is professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth
College. Dr. Dorsey provides advice to governments, foundations, and others, on
a variety of climate change matters to better participate and engage the
ongoing multilateral climate change negotiations. His recent publications on
climate change include “Green Market Hustlers,” in Foreign Policy In Focus. For
nearly two decades, Dorsey has sought to understand tensions between power,
(in)justice, and freedom in the realm of environmental conflicts and
institutional politics. At Mesa Refuge Dr. Dorsey will complete a volume on
global climate (in)justice.

Elaine Elinson, San Francisco, CA

Elaine Elinson, the former editor of the ACLU News, is a freelance writer and
communications consultant based in San Francisco. Her articles have appeared in
The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other newspapers. At Mesa, she
will be working on a book on the history of civil liberties in California that
will be published by Heyday Books in 2008.

Lyle Estill, Moncure, NC

Lyle Estill is a founder of Piedmont Biofuels, and the author of Biodiesel
Power; The Passion, People, and Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel. While at
Mesa Refuge he will be working on a new book Small is Possible; Life in a Local
Economy.

Bill Finnegan, New York, NY

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline
Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker
since 1987. At Mesa he will be working on a series of narrative essays about
his distended youth as an itinerant surfer living in fishing villages and
coastal slums in the global South.

Lee Goodman, Anchorage, AK

Based in Anchorage, Alaska, Lee Goodman is a writer and commercial fisherman
whose work has appeared in the Iowa Review and Orion Magazine. He was a writer
in residence at Interlocken Academy for the Arts, and was nominated for a
Pushcart Prize in fiction for his short story A Girl Like Summer. His writing
work both fiction and nonfiction, relies heavily on allusions to the natural
world. At Mesa he will be working on a book depicting the clash of development,
politics, economics, culture, and the environment in relation to tropical
deforestation.

Liese Greensfelder, Nevada City, CA

Liese Greensfelder is a freelance writer who focuses on medicine, biology and
agriculture. She has previously worked as a farm advisor for University of
California Cooperative Extension and as a science writer for UC San Francisco
and UC Berkeley. At Mesa she will work on Accidental Shepherdess, a book about
her experience as a 20-year-old Californian unexpectedly handed the reins of a
traditional Norwegian farm in a community still reliant on grass-based,
sustainable agricultural practices.

Marybeth Holleman, Anchorage, AK

Marybeth Holleman’s most recent book is The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan
Paradise Found and Nearly Lost. Her essays, poetry, and articles have appeared
in dozens of journals and anthologies, and she teaches creative writing at the
University of Alaska. While at Mesa, Marybeth will be at work on Off the Map: A
Year Away from School and Into the World.

Colleen Kaleda, Portland, OR

Colleen Kaleda is a Portland, Oregon based freelance journalist. Her writing
explores the connection between nature and culture. At the Mesa Refuge, she
will be working on a series of interconnected nonfiction essays from her world
travels that delve into the theme of an edgeless planet.

Virginia Kerns, Williamsburg, VA

Virginia Kerns, Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary,
has received awards for teaching and research, and for a recent book, Scenes
from the High Desert. At the Mesa Refuge she will be completing a book about
nature and culture in the desert West; a story of adaptation and survival,
before and during a time of environmental crisis.

Meredith Maran, Oakland, CA

Meredith Maran is the best-selling author of nine books of nonfiction, and an
award-winning journalist who writes for magazines and newspapers including
Salon, Vibe, Family Circle, More, Health, Parenting, Mother Jones, the San
Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury-News. She’s at work on her first
novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes.

Rick Piltz, Bethesda, MD

Rick Piltz is the Director of Climate Science Watch, a reform advocacy program
of the Government Accountability Project in Washington, DC. He writes the CSW
blog at www.climatesciencewatch.org. In 2005 he resigned in protest after 10
years in the coordination office of the federal Climate Change Science Program.
At Mesa Refuge he will be working on his first book, Breaking the Silence: A
Global Warming Whistleblower’s Story.

Elizabeth Rosner, Berkeley, CA

Elizabeth Rosner is an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. Her recent
novels Blue Nude and The Speed of Light explore the aftermath of the Holocaust,
with a focus on healing and reconciliation. At Mesa she will be working on her
new novel, Electric City, about the rise and fall of a company town.

Rinku Sen, Oakland, CA

Rinku Sen is the Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and
Publisher of ColorLines Magazine. Her book, The Accidental American, will
reveal the economic, racial and cultural conflicts embedded in the current
immigration debate through the experiences of Windows on the World head waiter,
union organizer, and Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh.

Judith Shaw, Bolinas, CA

A writer and family psychotherapist, Judith Shaw is author of the 1997 book
Raising Low-Fat Kids in a High-Fat World (Chronicle Books). In 2002 Judith was
awarded a residency at Mesa Refuge and completed her best-selling “Trans Fats;
The Hidden Killer in our Food,” (Simon & Schuster), a history of trans fats
and the health risks of what is now a ubiquitous no-no. This Fall at Mesa
Refuge, Judith will revise and update the manuscript for a second edition of
the book.

Meera Subramanian, New York, NY

Meera Subramanian is a narrative non-fiction writer who moved to New York City
from rural Oregon after more than a decade of doing nonprofit environmental
work. She has written about culture and the environment for The New York Times,
Salon, Grist, Audubon, Killing the Buddha and other publications. Meera will
use her time at Mesa Refuge to work on a literary non-fiction book about the
peregrine falcons of New York City, returned from the brink of extinction to
thrive in the unlikeliest of places, a story of hope, place and discovery.

Dave Wann, Golden, CO

David Wann has written, edited, or coauthored 9 books, including the bestseller
Affluenza and the recently-completed Simple Prosperity. At Mesa Refuge, he will
be working on Value Shift: An American Family’s Metamorphosis to a Sustainable
Lifestyle. David is President of the Sustainable Futures Society, a board
member of the Cohousing Association of the U.S., and a fellow of the Simplicity
Forum.

Tom Zoellner, New York, NY

Tom Zoellner is the author of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World
of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire, an American Library Assocation Notable book of
2006. He has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and as a
contributing editor for Men’s Health magazine. At Mesa, he is at work on a book
scheduled for publication by Penguin Press in 2008.

Spring / Summer 2006

Lane Barden

Lane Barden is a Los Angeles-based photographer, teacher and writer. Barden has
exhibited nationally and has published over forty reviews, interviews, and
feature articles on photography and contemporary art in numerous publications.
At Mesa, he will be working on a new book entitled 52 Miles Downstream: An
Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River that explores the original Los Angeles
watershed. His current interest is to define a hybrid form of landscape
photography and aerial photography with the potential to create a serial,
spatial iconography for observers of the 21st century landscape.

Mark Bittner

Mark Bittner is the author of a book and the subject of a documentary film,
both of which have the title The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. During his
stay at the Mesa Refuge he will be working on a new book about his years as a
homeless seeker on the streets of San Francisco. Mark lives in San
Francisco.

Carla Blank

Carla Blank is currently a writer, editor, and artistic director of The
Domestic Crusaders Project, whose publications include a cross disciplinary
reference, Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America 1900-2000
(Three Rivers, 2003), and Live OnStage!, an anthology of performing arts
techniques and styles available in teacher resource and student editions (Dale
Seymour, a Pearson Learning imprint, 1997, 2000), coauthored with Jody Roberts.
At Mesa Refuge she will work on What Really Happened in the Nineteenth
Century?, A Multicultural Timeline of America from 1800-1899.

Alan Burdick

Alan Burdick’s first book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
(Farrar Straus and Giroux), was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award.
His next book project will explore the nature and biology of time. He lives in
New York, where he works as a senior editor at Discover magazine and writes for
numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, and
Natural History.

Elizabeth Castle

Elizabeth Castle holds an academic specialist position at the University of
California, Berkeley and will be completing her first book Women Were the
Backbone, Men Were the Jawbone: American Indian Women’s Activism in the Red
Power Movement. Castle received her Ph.D. in social movement history from the
University of Cambridge and worked as a policy associate for President
Clinton’s Initiative on Race at the White House. The book stems from her
dissertation and is part of a larger web-based oral history project called
“Warrior Women: Indigenous Resistance and the Red Power Movement.”

Jane Elder

Jane Elder has been active in the environmental movement for over the last 30
years. She recently resigned as Executive Director of Biodiversity Project in
Madison, Wisconsin to devote more time to family, writing, and other creative
pursuits. She is working on a book of essays that explore the relationships
between place, culture, values, environment and economy in the Great Lakes
region.

Torri Estrada

Torri Estrada directs Environmental Justice Solutions, a non-profit
intermediary and fee-for-service consultant that provides strategic research,
technical assistance, and support to community-based organizations, social
justice groups, and the public sector in the areas of environmental justice and
policy. Torri currently is examining effective organizing and advocacy work in
communities of color, who are addressing, in an integrative manner,
environmental (including water, air, land conservation, and energy), economic,
and social issues in the West.

Adelheid Fischer

Adelheid Fischer is coordinator of InnovationSpace, a transdisciplinary design
laboratory at Arizona State University which supports the development of
products that improve society while minimizing impacts on the environment. She
is coauthor of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River
Region, winner of a 1999 Minnesota Book Award for nature writing. She currently
is coauthoring an environmental history of the Minnesota shore of Lake Superior
for the University of Minnesota Press. She makes her home at the foot of South
Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona.

Marisa Handler

Marisa Handler is a writer, activist, and musician living in San Francisco. She
has worked as an organizer within the global justice and peace movements, and
has traveled the world writing about sociopolitics and globalization. Her work
has appeared in–among others–the San Francisco Chronicle, Tikkun and Orion
magazines, Earth Island Journal, and on Salon.com and Alternet. At the Mesa
Refuge, Marisa will be working on her first book, Notes from an Activist: Tales
from the Global Justice Frontlines, due out in February 2007
(Berrett-Koehler).

Amanda Hawn

Amanda Hawn is the Editor of the Ecosystem Marketplace. She has a background in
ecology and evolutionary biology, conducting research in the United States, the
Netherlands Antilles, Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa. She was the
recipient of the Becky Colvin Memorial Prize for environmental thesis research
at Princeton University and completed her graduate work through a
Princeton-in-Africa Fellowship at the University of Cape Town. Since 2003, she
has worked as a science journalist covering the intersection of ecology and
economics. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including
The New York Times, The Economist, Conservation in Practice and, of course, the
Ecosystem Marketplace.

Linda Holland

Linda Holland is a California-based freelance writer who frequently visits her
home state of North Carolina. While at the Mesa Refuge, she will be making the
final edits to Food to Live By: The Earthbound Farm Cookbook, an organic
cookbook which will be published by Workman Publishers in Fall 2006. Her work
has appeared in Gourmet, The New York Times, and Hemispheres magazine. She
writes, cooks, and gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marjorie Kelly

Marjorie Kelly was co-founder and editor of Business Ethics magazine for 20
years. She is now a senior associate with the Tellus Institute in Boston. At
Mesa Refuge she will be writing about the core corporate design issues that
keep corporations from being truly sustainable.

Elin Kelsey

Elin Kelsey is a natural history and science writer specializing in wildlife
conservation and global issues. Her work appears in magazines such as New
Scientist and BBC Wildlife. She is the author of nine books, including her most
recent, Strange New Species: Astonishing Discoveries of Life on Earth (Maple
Tree Press, Sept 2005). At Mesa she will be working on a book for UC Press
about whales and the Sea of Cortez in Mexico–the richest place in the world to
see the greatest diversity of whales.

Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she teaches in performance, cultural and disability
studies. She is the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies
on Edge and The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art.
At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a manuscript called Community Performance:
An Introduction, and reflect on her recent experiences working as a community
artist in New Zealand.

Eugene Linden

Stacy Malkan

Stacy Malkan is communications director for Health Care Without Harm, an
international coalition working to shift the health care sector toward
non-toxic products and environmentally sustainable practices. Stacy is a former
journalist and newspaper publisher, and she is currently writing a book about
hazardous chemicals in cosmetics.

Ed Marston

Ed Marston is a native New Yorker who has spent 30 years publishing newspapers
and writing and editing books from a small coal-mining town in western
Colorado. He was the publisher of High Country News from 1983 to 2002. His
essays will describe how Paonia and 500,000 square miles of the West’s public
lands have changed his views of life and of the United States.

Paul Mishler

Paul Mishler is a labor educator, historian, longtime social justice activist,
and the Coordinator of Labor Studies at Indiana University South Bend. He
writes about social reform, the political activity of the labor movement, and
radical movements in the United States. His book, Raising Reds: Young Pioneers,
Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture (Columbia U. Press, 1999)
explores the creation of a radical oppositional culture by examining the ways
US radicals in the early and mid- 20th century attempted to pass their values
and beliefs on to their children. His current project, Wealth Against
Commonwealth: Labor and the Reform Tapestry, 1865-1920 is a documentary and
interpretive history of social reformers’ ideas about the emerging labor
movement, and focuses on the “conversation” which occurred among a broad range
of 19th and early 20th century activist-intellectuals.

Ellen Russell

Ellen Russell is Senior Economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives, a think-tank dedicated to promoting progressive policy options.
She will be writing about progressive approaches to the changing role of
banking in the contemporary economy.

Sherry Simpson

Sherry Simpson teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska
Anchorage. She’s writing a book about the relationships between bears and
people in Alaska for the University Press of Kansas. Her essays have appeared
in a book, The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories (Sasquatch Books, 1998), as
well as numerous anthologies and journals.

Christopher Sindt

Christopher Sindt directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s
College of California. He holds a Ph.D. in English and a Master’s degree in
Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. From 1992-1999, he
was the Program Director of the Art of the Wild Writing Conference. He has
received the James D. Phelan Award and residencies at the Macdowell Colony and
the Blue Mountain Center. A chapbook of his poetry, The Land of Give and Take
was published in 2002, and his poetry has appeared recently in nocturnes,
Swerve, Pool, and the Notre Dame Review. He serves on the Board of Directors of
the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Advisory Board of
WritersCorps.

Janice Thompson

Janice Thompson is the Executive Director of Oregon’s Money in Politics
Research Action Project and a coalition leader in Portland’s recent enactment
of full public funding campaign finance reform, Voter-Owned Elections. Having
been through the policy development process at both the state and local levels,
Janice will be preparing a resource guide for activists on how to write public
funding reform laws.

Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, and activist living in the Bay
Area, California. She’s spent the past several years traveling the world—the
Canadian Arctic, Alaska, Africa, etc.—to talk with people about the changes
they’ve seen as a consequence of our warming planet. She is currently at work
on the narrative for a documentary film chronicling these experiences. Her work
has appeared in, among other publications, The Sun, The Oakland Tribune, and
the Traveler’s Tales anthology, “The Best Women’s Travel Writing of 2006.”

Bob Wilson

Bob Wilson is taking a break after wearing many hats for 20 years on the staff
of the Portland Audubon Society. His writing has largely focused on the
intersection of nature and culture, and some of it has been collected in Wild
in the City (Michael C. Houck and M.J. Cody, eds.; Oregon Historical Society
Press, 2000). During his stay at Mesa Refuge, Bob will be using his recent
experience to flesh out and articulate a non-profit cultural model that
represents a distinct and hopeful alternative to business as usual.

Late Summer / Fall 2006

Julene Bair

Julene Bair’s personal essay collection, One Degree West: Reflections of a
Plainsdaughter, won the Mid-list Press First Series Award and Women Writing the
West’s Willa Award. She is working on a memoir combining her own story as a
member of a western Kansas farm family with reflections on Cheyenne Indian
history and that region’s declining surface and groundwater.

Shannon Biggs

Shannon Biggs is an activist, editor and writer at Global Exchange in San
Francisco. At Mesa, she will be working on her first book, Minding Our Own
Business: The Rise of the Local Green Economy Movement. She is a contributor to
Paradigm Warriors: Indigenous Responses to Economic Globalization (Sierra Club
Books); wrote the Global Exchange report, Election Readiness: Its Never Too
Late for Transparency; and edited Maude Barlow’s first treatise, Blue Gold: The
Commodification of the World’s Water for the International Forum on
Globalization.

Bill Carter

Bill Carter, writer and filmmaker, just completed the screenplay for his most
recent book, Fools Rush In (2005 Wenner/Hyperion Books. He completed the book
while at Mesa). The production company is Participant Productions (Syriana,
Goodnight Goodluck, and Inconvenient Truth). He will return to Mesa to work on
his new book Red Summer, to be published by Scribner’s of Simon and Schuster in
2007.

Christopher D. Cook

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning investigative journalist based in San
Francisco, and author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming
Food Crisis (New Press, 2004). He writes on agribusiness, labor and other
issues for Harper’s, The Economist, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Christian
Science Monitor, and others. At the Mesa Refuge, Christopher will be working on
a literary memoir about writing and disability.

Katharine Cook

Katharine Cook writes about our relationship to water, the earth, landscaping
and gardens; and on spirituality, the arts, aging and gender. She has published
narrative essays in Pacific Horticulture magazine, in Sierra Club’s Yodeler,
and in various Zen publications and local newspapers. While at Mesa Refuge she
will be writing on ways we might “nurture Nature” as a restoration strategy for
our parklands; how we might restore Spirit to water; and how we can relearn the
celebrations of our traditional seasonal solar festivals.

Eugene Coyle

Eugene Coyle, a Berkeley based free-lance economist, looks at energy from odd
angles for his consulting clients. Subject of a feature story in the Wall
Street Journal, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Baltimore
Sun, and other papers. His economic analysis of electricity privatization and
working time has appeared in journals and trade papers in Spanish and English.
At Mesa he will develop essays showing that the shorter working hours movement
is critical in the battle against global warming.

Tanya Dawkins

Tanya Dawkins is the founder/director of the Global-Local Links Project, a
Miami-based initiative dedicated to “putting people and communities at the
center of the global economy.” Tanya will be advancing several works in
progress during her time at Mesa, including a book project designed to
popularize and localize the globalization, trade and foreign policy debate and
a personal essay on diaspora citizenship. Her work has been published in
Hemisphere Magazine, the Miami Herald, Yes! Magazine and Perspectiva.

David Forrest

David Forrest grew up in a working class family and, in 1979, left a
professional career to go back to the factory with the goal of organizing the
unorganized, nonunion working class. In his book The View from the Factory
Floor he will tell stories of successes from the factory as well as those which
suggest the unworkability of capitalism as a system to meet the needs of human
beings on this planet. Beyond his day job, he coordinates a world-wide network
of working class leaders, and pursues ornithology and horticulture. He works
and lives on the east coast of the US.

Thomas H. Greco

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is an independent community and monetary economist,
writer, organizer, and former tenured college teacher. He has written three
books, including his most recent, Money: Understanding and Creating
Alternatives to Legal Tender (Chelsea Green, 2001). At Mesa Refuge, he will be
working on a new book that (1) reveals the crucial connections between the
control of credit and the concentration of political power; and (2) outlines
the voluntary, private initiatives that are restoring the “credit commons.”

Ryan Grim

Ryan Grim reports for the Washington City Paper and is a resident poetry
instructor with DC WritersCorps. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Slate,
Salon, The Nation, In These Times, and The American Prospect. At the Mesa
Refuge he will be writing a book on the evolution of the counterculture
movement from the sixties to today.

Katharine Haake

Katharine Haake is the author of three books of fiction and two books on
writing, including her most recent, That Water, Those Rocks which centers on
Shasta Dam and its rivers. While at Mesa, she will work on a novel that extends
her interest in the relation between narrative and nature in a hybridized form
that she describes as “post-modern eco fable.” A recent recipient of an
Individual Artist’s Grant from the City of Los Angeles, she chairs the Creative
Writing program at California State University, Northridge, and lives in
LA.

Leslie Jonath

Leslie Jonath is a Creative Director at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. In
her 15 years there, she has produced over 250 illustrated books on art,
photography, food, farming, design, and pop culture including The Pleasure of
Slow Food, Russia, and Living Homes. She is also the author of thirteen books
including a memoir, Postmark Paris, seven children’s books, and two cookbooks
benefiting non-profit causes. At Mesa she will be finishing a children’s book
entitled Play With Your World that will encourage families and children to
engage in and explore the natural world. She is also at work on an illustrated
story about her father called “It Takes a Rocket Scientist.”

Jane Juska

Jane Juska, after forty years teaching English in high school, college and
prison, is now a fulltime writer. Her publications are A Round-Heeled Woman
(Villard/Random House, 2003) and Unaccompanied Women (Villard/Random House,
2006). At Mesa she will continue work on a novel about aging and power. She
lives in Berkeley.

Eric Laursen

Eric Laursen is an independent writer and activist based in New York City.
Specializing in economic, political, and social justice topics, he was
co-founder of Plan Sponsor, the leading monthly magazine for US pension and
retirement plans. His work has also appeared in such publications as the
Village Voice, In These Times, Institutional Investor, and Z Magazine. As an
activist, he has worked with the War Resisters’ League, the New York City
Direct Action Network, and the International Solidarity Movement, among others.
At the Mesa Refuge he will be completing a history of the political and
cultural battle over Social Security, from 1980 to the present.

Micki McGee

Micki McGee, Ph.D., is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University. A
sociologist and cultural critic, her recent book Self-Help, Inc: Makeover
Culture in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) and website
(www.selfhelpinc.com) explore how declining real wages and vanishing job
security have encouraged the rise of makeover culture. During her stay at the
Mesa Refuge she will be working on a new book about autism and pervasive
development disorders.

Bill Mesler

Bill Mesler has worked as a journalist for the Seoul-based Korea Economic
Journal, the daily Santa Cruz Sentinel, the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian
and The Nation magazine. He is currently a freelance writer and lives in
Baltimore with his wife, National Public Radio producer Tracy Wahl. He is
currently working on a piece about war crimes centered on events that took
place during the Korean War.

Anna Mills

At The Mesa Refuge, Anna Mills will be writing a book about a solo trip that
ends in a ceremony of commitment to the Sierra Nevada. She explores how a
bumbling layperson can seek intellectual, sensual, and spiritual intimacy with
a particular place. She teaches English at City College of San Francisco and
has written essays for Salmagundi, North Dakota Quarterly, Writer’s Chronicle,
Banyan Review, and Under the Sun.

Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti is a correspondent for The Nation, specializing in
international affairs. His most recent book is The Freedom: Shadows and
Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (the New Press 2004). His two previous books
are The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror
(Basic Books, 2003), and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of
Crisis (Verso, 2000). He received a Ph.D in Sociology from the London School of
Economics in 2000.

Manuel Pastor

Manuel Pastor is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and co-director
of the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community at UC Santa Cruz. An
economist by training and an activist by predilection, his most recent book
(co-authored) is Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on
Race in America. At Mesa Refuge, he will be completing a co-authored manuscript
considering whether the emerging movement for regional equity—that is, for
reversing sprawl and revitalizing disadvantaged communities—can help resurrect
progressive politics in America.

Ritzy Ryciak

Ritzy Ryciak is a Seattle native, a biology teacher, and a regular contributor
to Pacific Northwest newspapers and magazines. She recently completed the
Olympic Peninsula section for Northwest Best Places guidebook and is a staff
writer for Conscious Choice Magazine. During her stay at Mesa Refuge she will
be working on a book (co-written with John de Graaf) tentatively titled,
Slippery Slope: How America Is Losing Ground When We Measure Things That
Matter.

Marcia Smith

Marcia Smith is a writer and President of Firelight Media, a Berkeley-based
documentary film production company. She won the Writers’ Guild award and a
primetime Emmy nomination for the film The Murder of Emmett Till in 2003, and
her book, Black America: A Journey in Photographs (Thunder Bay), was published
in 2002. Firelight’s latest film, Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples
Temple, will be released in the fall. At Mesa, she will work on a film about
domestic violence in the African American community.

Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly Wren Spaulding is a Michigan-based writer, poetry teacher, activist, farm
worker, and board member of a regional community currency project. She
co-founded Sweetwater Alliance, a grassroots organization committed to
liberating water and other essential resources from corporate control.
Spaulding’s work has appeared in The Ecologist, Clamor, Earth First! Journal,
Alternet, Z Magazine, and The New Internationalist. At Mesa Refuge she’ll be
working on her first book, tentatively titled The Good Water: Essays and
Interviews from the Global Water Uprising, due out in 2007 from AK Press.

Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a library administrator and a grassroots political and
environmental activist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of
Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West (Verso, 1999), an account of
his adventures while making polluters accountable, and Hope’s Horizon: Three
Visions for Healing the American Land (Island Press, 2004), a tour of
innovative and catalytic conservation campaigns and the science behind them. He
also writes for Tomdispatch.com. His project at the Mesa Refuge will focus on
the abandonment and criminalization of the indigent mentally ill.

Spring / Summer 2005

Elizabeth Bernays

Elizabeth Bernays has been an entomologist since the 1960s, and is now retiring
early from her position as Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona to
devote time to writing. She has published essays and poems in several literary
journals as well as over 100 articles in international scientific journals. At
the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a book of essays combining research,
narrative, and meditations concerning people and nature.

Katy Butler

Katy Butler, a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a freelance
journalist in Mill Valley, California, and a practicing Buddhist. She writes
personal essays and social criticism focusing on the interface between the
individual and larger social and economic forces. Her writing has appeared in
The New Yorker, Sierra Magazine, Mother Jones, the L.A. Times Sunday Magazine,
The Buddhist Review, and many other national publications. At the Mesa Refuge,
she will be writing an essay on community fragmentation and
“hyper-consumerism”.

Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke, an environmental journalist since 1989 and Editor of Earth Island
Journal, has written for a wide range of publications including Orion,
CounterPunch, Terrain, California Wild and the San Francisco Examiner, as well
as for the Knight-Ridder news syndicate. His time at the Mesa Refuge will be
spent on a book on the Joshua tree, the emblematic tree of the Mojave
Desert.

Jeff Conant

Jeff Conant is a writer, educator and social justice activist based in
Berkeley, California. He is working with the Hesperian Foundation to develop A
Community Guide to Environmental Health to be used by grassroots environment
and health activists throughout the developing world. He will work on several
chapters of this book at the Mesa Refuge.

Cameron Davis

Cameron Davis is the Executive Director of the Lake Michigan Federation. He is
writing about the “genealogy of landscape” with the transformation of Illinois’
waterways and tallgrass prairies—now one of the Continent’s most endangered
ecosystems—as a backdrop to the 30-year friendship between Abraham Lincoln and
Levi Davis.

William deBuys

William deBuys has long been involved in land and water conservation in the
Southwest. His most recent book is Seeing Things Whole: the Essential John
Wesley Powell. Currently he is a professor of Documentary Studies at the
College of Santa Fe. While at the Mesa Refuge he will be finishing a cycle of
essays that center on a walk he has been taking for twenty-eight years.

Phoenix Eagleshadow

Phoenix Eagleshadow is the Outreach Coordinator of Diversity Programs for the
Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at the University of
California at Santa Cruz and the Director of Raven Medicine Lodge, a Native
California Indian Traditional Medicine and Ethnobiological not-for-profit. She
is currently researching the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic
research, including ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. While at Mesa, she will
be working to complete a manuscript on the Creation Story of the Awansa Ohlone
people of California’s Monterey Bay.

Robert Engelman
Robert Engelman is Vice President for Research at
Population Action International in Washington, D.C., and chairs the board of
the Maryland-based Center for a New American Dream. He was a longtime newspaper
reporter and co-founder of the Society of Environmental Journalists. A visiting
lecturer at Yale University, Engelman has written extensively on human
population and the natural environment. At Mesa, he will be working on his
first book — Uncrowding Eden: Population, the Lives of Women, and the Return of
Nature — which Island Press will publish in 2006.

Brian Jamison

Brian Jamison is the founder and President of the Board of the GoBiodiesel
Cooperative, a Portland-based group dedicated to biodiesel education and
production. An accomplished start-up entrepreneur, he owns an earth-friendly
apartment complex, is a co-founder of OpenSourcery, a sustainable computer
consultancy, and is involved in News4Neighbors.net, a local Portland news site.
At the Mesa Refuge he will be completing Power from the People, a guide to
starting and sustaining a biodiesel cooperative.

Hilary Kaplan

Hilary Kaplan is an MFA candidate in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
Her writing on California’s urban environments appears in The Next American
City magazine. At Mesa Refuge, she will work on a book of oral histories about
the Los Angeles River collected through the Gathering at the River oral history
project, which she directs.

Virginia Kerns

Virginia Kerns is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William &
Mary in Virginia. Her most recent book, Scenes from the High Desert: Julian
Steward’s Life and Theory, received the Clements Prize for Best Nonfiction Book
on the American Southwest and the Evans Biography Award. At Mesa Refuge she
will work on a book about the desert West in the 1930s, and the connections
between environmental degradation and cultural survival.

Jane Midgley

Jane Midgley directs Strategies for Success in Somerville, Massachusetts,
working with nonprofit organizations and executive directors. She served as
both legislative and executive director of the Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom and has written and spoken extensively about national budget
priorities. She will be working on her book, Women and the U.S. Budget, at the
Mesa Refuge.

David Oates

David Oates is the author of books exploring nature and culture, most recently
Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature (Oregon State, 2003). At Mesa he is
finishing his book about walking Portland’s 260-mile Urban Growth Boundary, a
collaborative urban adventure called Boundary Conditions.

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire, Second Nature, and A
Place of My Own, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. His
writing has received numerous awards, and his articles have been anthologized
in Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, and the Norton Book of
Nature Writing. Formerly serving as Executive Editor of Harper’s Magazine, he
is currently Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of
Journalism. While at Mesa he’ll be completing a book on the ecology and ethics
of eating, tentatively titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Jessica Prentice

Jessica Prentice is a cooking teacher, freelance chef, foodsystems educator and
writer. She has served as chef at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin,
California, and as Director of Educational Programs at Center for Urban
Education about Sustainable Agriculture, which operates the Ferry Plaza Farmers
Market in San Francisco. While at Mesa Refuge, she will be working on finishing
her new book of food essays and recipes with an ecological emphasis: Thirteen
Moons: Food and the Hunger for Connection, forthcoming from Chelsea Green
Publishing (VT).

Ruth Rosen

Ruth Rosen is a pioneering historian of gender and society and an award-winning
journalist. She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California
at Davis and the recipient of many national fellowships. She authored The Lost
Sisterhood: Prostitution in America and The World Split Open: How The Modern
Women’s Movement Changed America, and was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times
and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is now Director of Gender and Public
Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute. At Mesa Refuge, she will
write about reframing domestic and global public policy in If Women Really
Mattered, the working title of her next book.

Debra Salazar

Debra Salazar is Professor of Political Science at Western Washington
University. Her articles have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political
Science, Society and Natural Resources, the Journal of Forestry, BC Studies,
and Witness among others. Recently she has become obsessed with how immigrant
Latinos, as workers, intersect with environmental politics. At the Mesa Refuge
she will fret over an essay about unions, environmentalists, and pesticide
politics in the Pacific Northwest.

Beth Sawin

Beth Sawin is a systems researcher, teacher, and writer based at Sustainability
Institute in Hartland, Vermont. She lives on an organic farm and intentional
community, also in Hartland. Her work at the Mesa Refuge will include a number
of short essays on systems and sustainability and a larger piece on sharpening
our intuition about the dynamics of climate change.

Melissa K. Scanlan

Melissa K. Scanlan is the Founder and Executive Director of Midwest
Environmental Advocates, a Wisconsin-based environmental law center. She is the
recipient of the 1999 Harmon Award for the Best Environmental Law Writing, and
has written “The Evolution of the Public Trust Doctrine and the Degradation of
Trust Resources: Courts, Trustees, and Political Power in Wisconsin” (27
Ecology Law Quarterly 135, 2000). At the Mesa Refuge, Scanlan will be writing
about the legal and policy implications of exporting and privatizing Great
Lakes water.

Jennifer Sumner

Dr. Jennifer Sumner is an Assistant Professor in the Adult Education and
Community Development Program at OISE/University of Toronto, Canada. Her
interests include sustainability, globalization, rural communities and organic
agriculture. She recently published a book entitled Sustainability and the
Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization. At the Mesa
Refuge, Jennifer will be writing about organic farmers, environmental
stewardship and rural community development.

Tom Turner

Tom Turner is senior editor at Earthjustice, where he writes a newsletter,
magazine articles, and opinion pieces. He is author of three books: Wild By
Law, Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature, and most recently, Justice on
Earth: Earthjustice and the People it Has Served. At the Mesa Refuge he will
work on a book about recent developments in the management of the national
forests, examining especially the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

Summer / Fall 2005

Tom Angotti

Tom Angotti is professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, City
University of New York. He is working on a book about community planning in New
York City, (which he calls “the real estate capital of the world”) to be
published by MIT Press. He writes for www.gothamgazette.com, is author of
Metropolis 2000: Planning Poverty and Politics (Routledge, 1993) and Housing in
Italy: Urban Development and Political Change (Praeger, 1977), and is co-editor
of Progressive Planning Magazine.

David Bacon

Frederica Bowcutt

Frederica Bowcutt teaches botany in interdisciplinary team-taught programs at
The Evergreen State College, a small liberal arts college in Olympia,
Washington. Dr. Bowcutt has published floras on state parks in the North Coast
Range and Central Valley of California. Her essays have appeared in the journal
Human Ecology and an anthology compiled by Carolyn Merchant entitled Green
Versus Gold: Sources in California’s Environmental History. She is currently
working on a book entitled Tanoak Malpractice, which explores the history of
forest use in northwestern California by focusing on the use and abuse of a
common hardwood tree species.

Andrew Boyd

Andrew Boyd was one of the driving forces behind Billionaires for Bush and the
Million Billionaire March. He founded, and for several years directed, the arts
and action program at United for a Fair Economy. His writing has appeared in
The Nation, the Village Voice, and several anthologies on recent social
movements. Andrew is the author of The Activist Cookbook, a source book on
creative direct action, as well as two ironically serious (or is it seriously
ironic?) books published by W. W. Norton: Daily Afflictions and Life’s Little
Deconstruction Book. He is currently chief “idea gerbil” at Working Assets.
During his stay at Mesa, he will be working on an article entitled “Open Source
Organizing: A New Model for Grass-Roots Collaboration.”

Linda Hawes Clever

Linda Hawes Clever, MD, an internist and occupational medical specialist, is
founder and president of RENEW, a nationally known not-for-profit that aims to
strengthen institutions and society by helping busy people sustain (or regain)
their enthusiasm, effectiveness and purpose. Dr. Clever is widely published on
the subjects of leadership; volunteerism; ethics; and the interactions of life,
work and health. At the Mesa Refuge, Linda will work on a book for those of us
who want to follow our “callings” and who also want to have a fulfilling life
that values family, friends, community, and ourselves.

Lauren Coodley

Lauren Coodley is a Professor of History at Napa community college, where she
has taught teaching courses ranging from Women’s Studies to Children’s
Literature, to Overcoming Math Anxiety, to California History. She is currently
elected chair of Social Sciences Division. She is the author of Napa: the
Transformation of an American Town (Arcadia Publishing 2004) and editor of The
Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair’s California (Heyday Books,
2004), which she developed as a resident at Mesa Refuge. She returns to Mesa
this year to work on a collection of documents related to California’s “lost
history”—environmental and labor struggles—for a Prentice-Hall textbook.

Mary Dickson

Mary Dickson is an award-winning Salt Lake City writer who has written about
nuclear testing-related topics and worked on issues of peace and justice for
three decades. She has written newspaper and magazine articles, essays and
opinion pieces on a broad range of subjects, and has worked as Director of
Creative Services for KUED Public Television for the past 16 years. While at
the Mesa Refuge, she will work on writing a book-length manuscript that blends
her moving personal story as a “downwinder” with powerful documentation on the
far-reaching impact of the US nuclear testing program to show the very real
human toll of what the New York Times called, “The most prodigiously reckless
program of scientific experimentation in US history.”

Gregory Dicum

Gregory Dicum writes about interfaces between the human and natural worlds in
books like The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop
(The New Press, 1999) and Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air
(Chronicle Books, 2004), as well as in magazines like the New York Times
Magazine, Harper’s, Orion, Travel & Leisure, Mother Jones, Gastronomica,
and others. He is a contributing editor at Other magazine and his column about
Bay Area environmental issues appears in the online edition of the San
Francisco Chronicle. At the Mesa Refuge he plans to work on an urban ecology
handbook that will introduce readers to the natural world though their
experiences living in the city.

Jeff Fair

Jeff Fair is an Alaskan author and wildlife biologist by training. He has
studied loons and other spirits from Maine to the Great Land and published four
books including The Great American Bear (NorthWord, 1990). His essays appear in
Audubon, Alaska magazine, Natural History, The Christian Science Monitor, Wild
Earth, Appalachia, and several anthologies. At Mesa Refuge he will start a book
about another biologist’s intimate thirty-year association with a local
population of brown bears and what we might learn from the power of such
connections.

Ruth Fleischer

Ruth Fleischer served for two decades as a Congressional staff member
specializing in the areas of environmental, energy and natural resource policy.
She has also been an advisor on these matters to four presidential candidates.
She currently teaches law part-time and lobbies on behalf of environmental
groups. Her writing project will examine the strategies needed to advance the
environmental agenda in Congress and the relationship of the environmental
movement to other progressive movements.

Barbara Gates

Barbara Gates’ Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place (Shambhala
Publications, 2003) recently came out in paperback. She is cofounder and
coeditor with Wes Nisker of the international Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind.
As a freelance book editor, her clients have included Howard Cutler for the
Dalai Lama (The Art of Happiness) and Sharon Salzberg (Lovingkindness). She
will use her time at Mesa Refuge to work on a new book, Garbage, A Love Letter,
about the transformation of what is rejected as useless, unredeemable or
poisonous into the life-affirming, beautiful, even sacred.

Merrill Goozner

Merrill Goozner directs the Integrity in Science project at the Center for
Science in the Public Interest in Washington, DC. A journalist for over 20
years, he has served as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, as writer and
contributing editor for American Prospect, and as freelance writer for Columbia
Journalism Review, The New York Times, Salon.com, and the Washington Monthly,
among others. He is the author of a recently published book, The $800 Million
Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs (University of California Press,
2004). He will be using his time at the Mesa Refuge to write about the ethical,
social and legal approaches of recently enacted state stem cell research
programs for a magazine article that explores possible alternatives.

Robin Kimmerer

Robin Kimmerer is a Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State
University of New York. She has published numerous articles in environmental
and science journals, and her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural
History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003) received the
prestigious 2005 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding natural history writing.
At Mesa Refuge, she will be working on “stories of reciprocity”: looking at
reciprocal relationships in nature as a model for sustainable human and
ecological communities.

Michael Kustudia

Michael Kustudia is an independent researcher, writer and community advocate in
Missoula, Montana. With a focus on sustainability issues, Michael spent six
years with the nonprofit National Center for Appropriate Technology. He
currently coordinates the activities of the Clark Fork River Technical
Assistance Committee, a watershed citizens’ group involved in one of the
nation’s largest Superfund cleanups. At the Mesa Refuge, he will complete a
book proposal for a nonfiction work on North American conservation ideas and
imperialism in the Cordillera Central of the Dominican Republic.

Ken Lamberton

Ken Lamberton recently published Beyond Desert Walls: Essays from Prison (The
University of Arizona Press, March 2005) and is currently working on a book
about southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz River called Redeeming the Holy Cross:
Stories of Life, Death, and Hope on the Santa Cruz River. Previous books
include Chiricahua Mountains: Bridging the Borders of Wildness (The University
of Arizona Press, October 2003) and Wilderness and Razor Wire (Mercury House,
January 2000). His writing on the desert southwest has appeared in numerous
literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He lives in Tucson with his wife
and three daughters, who remind him daily of his own redemption at their
hands.

Jane LaTour

Jane LaTour writes for the Public Employee Press of District Council 37,
AFSCME, the largest municipal union in New York City. She is currently working
on an oral history of the feminist pioneers who entered the nontraditional
blue-collar skilled jobs in the 1970s. Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Organizing
for Equality will be published as part of the Palgrave Series in Oral History,
St. Martin’s Press. In May 2005, she received the Mary Heaton Vorse Award from
the Metro New York Labor Communications Council for a series of articles on the
Iraq War and its impact on the members of District Council 37.

Lisa Margonelli

Lisa Margonelli is a journalist who has written for the San Francisco Magazine,
Wired, Mother Jones, Salon, Jane and other publications. Her book, Oil On the
Brain: Travels in the World of Petroleum, will be published by Nan A.
Talese/Doubleday in 2006. The book looks at the economy and culture of oil
through the lives of people who work along the supply chain.

Edward Pennick

Edward “Jerry” Pennick is director of the Land Assistance Fund for the
Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a non-profit organization that focuses on
African-American land retention and sustainable development. He has studied and
written extensively on land tenure issues as they relate to people of color and
is currently co-authoring a book on the history and impact of the Emergency
Land Fund; the first organization in America whose sole purpose was the
preservation of African-American owned land.

Rebecca Reider

Rebecca Reider recently received her Masters degree from the Yale School of
Forestry and Environmental Studies, and next year will study sustainable
agriculture in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship. At the Mesa Refuge, she
will work on a book telling the story of the Biosphere 2 project and its
builders’ quest to create a perfect human-nature relationship under glass.

Canyon Sam

Canyon Sam is a writer, teacher, activist and nationally-acclaimed performance
artist. Her written work has been published in Shambhala Sun, Seattle Review,
San Jose Mercury News, and in numerous anthologies in the feminist and Buddhist
press. All her one-woman plays have been published. Her first work, Taxi Karma/
The Dissident grew out of her activism in the Tibet support movement which
began in the mid-1980’s during her year-long solo journey through Central Asia.
It toured twelve cities across the US and Canada in 1992-94. At Mesa Refuge,
she will be working on a memoir about her recent journey to China and Tibet in
which she documents the oral histories of Tibetan women. She is currently
teaching at John F. Kennedy University in the Arts and Consciousness Masters
Program.

Spring / Summer 2004

Davis Baltz

Davis Baltz is a Senior Project Director at Commonweal, a health and
environmental research and service institute in Bolinas, California. As a
public health experiment, Davis had his chemical “body burden” measured in a
biomonitoring study, which detected 106 toxic substances in his body. At the
Mesa Refuge, Davis will develop a series of opinion and feature articles for
publication that discuss current research about individual exposure to
chemicals, links to disease, and chemical regulation policies of the United
States government.

Sally Cole

Sally Cole is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal,
Canada. Her most recent book is Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (2003). She
is currently interviewing women migrant workers in northeast Brazil as part of
a larger project on gender and globalization. At the Mesa Refuge she will be
completing a book of stories of First Nation Canadian Ojibwa women’s lives.

Dan Connell

Dan Connell is the author of numerous books and articles on the Horn of Africa.
His latest is Taking on the Superpowers: Collected Articles on the Eritrean
Revolution (1976-1982), Vol. 1 (2003). Volume 2 is due out in March 2004. Dan
teaches journalism and African politics at Simmons College, Boston.

Robert Glennon

Robert Glennon serves as Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy at
the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. His recent
book, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh
Waters, addresses environmental problems caused by groundwater pumping and
proposes solutions to consumer-driven water use. At the Mesa Refuge, Robert
will work on a project examining water law and contemporary water transfers in
12 western states.

Simeon Herskovits

Simeon Herskovits is an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center in
Taos, New Mexico, where his work has focused on water resource governance
problems. At the Mesa Refuge, Simeon will be writing on the public trust
doctrine, water law reform, and the fundamental tenets of our relationship with
the natural resources on which we depend.

Jake Kosek

Jake Kosek is a Lecturer in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology
at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for
International Studies at UC Berkeley. He is co-author of Race, Nature and the
Politics of Difference and has written extensively on questions of human rights
and natural resources in the US and abroad. At the Mesa Refuge, he plans to
work on a manuscript on the racial dimensions of the Forest Service’s Smokey
Bear campaign as part of a project dedicated to new approaches in environmental
justice.

Eugene Linden

Eugene Linden writes about animals and humanity’s relationship with nature in
books, articles and essays. His most recent book is Winds of Change: Climate,
Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. Next spring, Viking will publish
The Ragged Edge of the World, a book about his travels over 30 years
to that moveable frontier where wildlands, indigenous peoples, and modernity
collide. While at Mesa he will be working on a new project on animal
intelligence as well as some final revisions of Zoo Stories, a book for young
adults that follows the theme of his books The Parrot’s Lament and
The Octopus and the Orangutan.

Rania Masri

Rania Masri is Director of the Southern Peace Research and Education Center at
the Institute for Southern Studies. She has published chapters in Iraq – A
Liberated Country?; Iraq: Its History, People and Politics, The Struggle for
Palestine; and Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions War. Ra–ia will
be working on essays on relationships between environment, warfare, and
identity and exile _ from her personal experiences as an anti-war activist and
an environmental scientist.

Stephanie Mills

Stephanie Mills is author of a number of books on ecology, including Turning
Away From Technology, Epicurian Simplicity and In Service of the Wild. At the
Mesa Refuge, Stephanie will work on her newest book, a biography of Schumacher
Society Founder Robert Swann entitled Peace, Justice, Land and Community: A
Life of Robert Swann.

Kathleen Dean Moore

Kathleen Dean Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State
University, where she directs the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and
the Written Word. She is the author of award-winning books about the cultural
and spiritual values of water: Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water;
Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World; and The Pine Island Paradox,
forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. At the Mesa Refuge, she will write about
Rachel Carson and the moral importance of a sense of wonder.

Craig Neal

Craig Neal is co-Founder of the Heartland Institute, which holds the vision
that organizational transformation is ultimately individual transformation, and
that business and organizational life are the conduits and the delivery system
to a global renaissance in these times. Craig is co-Author of 12 Step Wisdom at
Work: Transforming Your Life and Your Organization. At the Mesa Refuge, Craig
will be working on a field guide for activists on the Heartland Institute’s key
vision for social and organizational transformation.

Nancy Nichols

Nancy Nichols is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in many major
publications. During her lengthy career she has held positions as a senior
editor at the Harvard Business Review, as a reporter for the Mac-Neil/Lehrer
Newshour, and as a producer for public television. Her work has appeared in the
Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and
The Harvard Business Review. At the Mesa Refuge she will write about
environmental health, businesses, and the pollution of her hometown in
Illinois.

Angela Nissel

Angela Nissel is the author of The Broke Diaries (Villard, 2001) and a story
editor for the NBC sitcom Scrubs. Angela’s writing has also appeared in
publications such as The Oprah Magazine and CosmoGirl. At the Mesa Refuge,
Angela will complete a book that focuses on self-identification among
mixed-race women.

Karen Peabody O’Brien

Karen Peabody O’Brien is Research Associate at The Ingenuity Project (TIP) at
the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia.
At TIP, Karen coordinates efforts to generate MBA curriculum materials around
issues of environmental sustainability. Karen is writing a book tentatively
entitled New Products, New Markets: The Business Case for Environmental Design.
Geared to business educators, the book will offer compelling frameworks for
environmentally sustainable business practices.

Carolyn Raffensperger

Carolyn Raffensperger is Executive Director of the Science and Environmental
Health Network and one of the leading proponents of the precautionary
principle. While at the Mesa Refuge she will be exploring ideas such as
ecological medicine, the precautionary principle and the public trust doctrine
through the lens of a memoir.

Christopher Rude

Christopher Rude is Assistant Director of the Center for Economic Policy
Analysis at the New School in New York. He previously worked as an economist at
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and on Wall Street. Christopher is
organizing a conference at the New School on “Pension Fund Capitalism and the
Crisis of Old Age Security in the United States.” At the Mesa Refuge, he will
write an article for the conference on the role of pensions and mutual funds in
the US economy and their possible roles in fostering the current crisis in
corporate governance.

Bill Sherwonit

Nature writer Bill Sherwonit has contributed essays and articles to a wide
variety of newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies and is the author
of 10 books about Alaska. Most recently he’s co-editor of Travelers’ Tales
Alaska. Bill also teaches nature writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage
and on his own. At the Mesa Refuge, he will work on a literary, book-length
narrative about his life-changing relationship with the Alaska’s Brooks Range
wilderness, while exploring notions of wild nature and its essential value to
humans.

Allen Smith

Allen Smith is a writer and consultant on Alaska public land issues. He served
The Wilderness Society for eighteen years as Alaska Senior Policy Analyst 2002
to 2004, Alaska Regional Director 1989 to 2002, and Vice President 1986 to
1989. He was President of Defenders of Wildlife 1982 to 1986 and Executive
Officer, Land and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice 1979
to 1982. At Mesa Refuge, Allen will write about Alaska as seen through the
stories of the land and its people, their dependence on wildlands for economic
sustainability, and Alaska’s connections to the lower 48.

Ron Steffens

Ron Steffens writes essays and journalism on natural history and environmental
issues. He regularly reviews environmental books for Bloomsbury Review and his
work has been published in Wild Earth, National Parks, and in “Resist Much,
Obey Little,” a remembrance of Edward Abbey. He has taught journalism and
writing for 10 years at Southwestern Oregon Community College and will begin
teaching at Green Mountain College in Vermont this fall. He recently won an
Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for a nonfiction manuscript in progress,
focused upon his work as a seasonal park ranger and firefighter at Grand Teton
National Park.

Kelly Sterns

Kelly Sterns is a nationally award-winning poet and teacher with a passionate
interest in trailer park culture. Her previous work includes “My Home Has
Wheels,” an oral history and essay project with mobile home dwellers in her
Albuquerque, New Mexico community and in trailer parks across the nation. At
the Mesa Refuge, Kelly will write “Talking Trash (Trailer Trash),”
environmentally -focused materials geared toward the nation’s 20 million
trailer park residents on issues such as recycling, water use and local
environmental action.

Michelle Stevens

Michelle Stevens is Project Manager for Eden Again/Iraq Foundation’s project to
restore the Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq and has studied and taught on
wetland restoration for 15 years. She is author of Healing the Land, Healing
the People: Ethnobotany of the Putah-Cache Creeks Bioregion. At the Mesa
Refuge, Michelle will work on a new book in process called Fire in the Water:
Ethnobotany of Wetland Plants in California.

Benjamin Webb

Benjamin Webb serves as Rector and College Chaplain at St. Luke’s Episcopal
Church and Chaplaincy at the University of Northern Iowa, where he strives to
connect the faith community to social and environmental concerns. He recently
completed Fugitive Faith, a book of interviews on spiritual, environmental and
community renewal. At the Mesa Refuge, Benjamin will work on a new book
pointing to sources of hope and our need for a regenerative society.

Summer / Fall 2004

Jackie Hunt Christensen

Jackie Hunt Christensen has been an environmental activist for 18 years and has
worked with Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Health Care Without
Harm. She is now working on a project exploring the environmental links to
Parkinson’s disease. At the Mesa Refuge, Jackie will be compiling and analyzing
the results of interviews with leaders in the environmental health community
and in health-impacted organizations. These leaders will all have answered
questions about how they came to be active and how they believe political and
social changes happen. The resulting profiles may take the form of an essay or
a book.

Peter Dorman

Peter Dorman is a member of the faculty in political economy at The Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Washington. He is the author of Markets and
Mortality: Economics, Dangerous Work and the Value of Human Life as well as
numerous articles and reports on a wide range of economic topics. At the Mesa
Refuge he will be working on a new college-level introductory economics
textbook based on principles of active learning and critical thinking, as well
as a broader perspective on the purposes and methods of economics itself.

Sarah Gage

Sarah Gage is a writer, writing instructor and botanist whose creative
nonfiction and scientific articles have appeared in Seattle Weekly, Douglasia,
Northwest Science, the American Journal of Botany and many other publications.
Sarah served as the chief US Botanist for the International Kuril Island
Project, which surveyed the biodiversity of the Kuril Islands, stretching from
Japan’s northernmost island to the southern tip of Russia’s Kamchatka
Peninsula. At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a series of essays called
“Kuril Island Summers” combining adventure travel narrative with scientific
information to draw general readers into an exploration of the islands.

Harold Glasser
Harold Glasser, Associate Professor in the
Environmental Studies Program at Western Michigan University, works at the
nexus where environmental science, policy, philosophy, values, business,
design, economics, history and education meet. He holds degrees in physics,
energy systems design and environmental engineering. Working with the
Foundation for Deep Ecology, he recently edited the eleven-volume Selected
Works of Arne Naess. At the Mesa Refuge, Harold will develop a new book
proposal exploring how societies, from ancient to contemporary, did and do make
choices about using and protecting the environment.

Mary Gomes

Mary Gomes, Ph.D. is co-director of Altars of Extinction, a series of altars
honoring species that have gone extinct at human hands. She is co-editor of
Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, and an Associate
Professor of Psychology at Sonoma State University. She has also co-produced
the Ocean Song Earth Day Festival in Occidental, CA, for the last four years.
While at the Mesa Refuge, she will be starting work on a book, Vanished:
Understanding Extinction and Honoring Life.

Hal Hamilton

Hal Hamilton is Director of Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont, and
he leads a sustainable food project with influential players from the US,
Europe and Latin America. Hal has written chapters in three books and has
authored many articles. He is now writing stories from his experience of more
than 30 years of farming and changes in farming systems. His goal is to
contribute to major shifts where issues of scale, technology, and inequity are
the most “stuck.”

Guy Hand

Guy Hand is a freelance writer and radio producer. He has contributed to NPR’s
“Living On Earth,” “Radio High Country News,” “Public Radio Weekend” as well as
print publications including the Los Angeles Times, Audubon, Sierra, Orion,
Northern Lights, DoubleTake, and others. In 2002 the Society of Environmental
Journalists named his two-part radio series on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest
the best feature radio piece of the year. The Nieman Foundation called the
series “a lesson in the art of radio.” At the Mesa Refuge he will work on a
book about nature and the media.

Toni Martin

Toni Martin, a physician and writer, practices internal medicine and has served
on the clinical faculty of UCSF Medical School. Her essays have appeared in
many publications, most recently The Berkeley Monthly and The Threepenny
Review. At the Mesa Refuge, she will continue work on a book about the
generation of women doctors inspired by the women’s health movement.

Tom McNamee

Tom McNamee is author of The Grizzly Bear (Knopf, 1984), Nature First: Keeping
Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild (Roberts Rinehart, 1987), A Story of
Deep Delight (Viking, 1990), and The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (Holt,
1997). His essays, poems, reviews, and reporting have appeared in Audubon, The
New Yorker, High Country News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a
number of literary journals. Tom has served on the boards of directors of the
Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Rare Center for Tropical Conservation. He
is now at work on Alice: The Life, Times, and Vision of Alice Waters and Chez
Panisse.

Mary O’Brien
Mary O’Brien is a botanist who has served as a staff
scientist for environmental advocacy organizations for 22 years. She wrote her
book Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment,
after observing for 15 years the problems posed by risk assessment-based
decision-making. While at the Mesa Refuge, she will be working on a book on
Hells Canyon, Oregon, after observing its native plants and animals for 15
years.

Tom Price

Tom Price is a freelance journalist who writes on environmental and cultural
topics, with an emphasis on the intersection between adventure travel and
conservation. His articles appear in Outside, National Geographic Adventure,
Men’s Journal, Mother Jones, Sierra and other periodicals. Tom is now working
on a book about the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the economic and environmental
pressures from mining corporations and globalization that are endangering their
existence.

Carmelo Ruiz

Carmelo Ruiz is Director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety. He has
written extensively on genetically modified foods, globalization, industrial
agriculture, organic farming and genetic commons, and his writing has appeared
in E Magazine, Corporate Watch, Earth Island Journal, Alternet,
Spanish-language publications including La Jornada, and many other newspapers
and magazines. At the Mesa Refuge, Carmelo will work on a book project entitled
“Transgenic Ballad: Biotechnology, Globalization and the Clash of
Paradigms.”

Mark Salvo

Mark Salvo is an attorney who serves as Grasslands and Deserts Advocate for
American Lands Alliance and Counselor to the National Public Lands Grazing
Campaign. He helps direct interrelated campaigns to protect and restore the
Sagebrush Sea and to lobby Congress to enact a voluntary federal grazing permit
buyout program. While at the Mesa Refuge, Mark will write about the utility of
voluntary grazing permit buyout to permanently resolve wolf-livestock conflicts
in the Northern Rockies.

Barbara Sattler

Barbara Sattler is the Director of the Environmental Health Education Center
and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. She
began the first Environmental Health Nursing Graduate Program in the country.
She writes extensively in popular nursing literature about environmental health
and she co-authored Environmental Health and Nursing Practice with Dr. Jane
Lipscomb. Additionally, she co-chairs the Nursing Workgroup of the Health Care
Without Harm Campaign. Barbara will use her time at Mesa Refuge to develop new
pieces for professional nurses on environmental health.

Sandy Tolan

Sandy Tolan is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the
UC Berkeley, and is an accomplished radio documentary reporter and producer.
His work has aired on NPR, Public Radio International, the CBC and Australian
Broadcasting. He is Executive Producer of Homelands Productions, an independent
news, feature and radio documentary service specializing in public interest
reporting and journalism education. At the Mesa Refuge, Sandy will work on The
Lemon Tree, a book project that builds on his series “Vanishing Homelands” and
his award-winning documentary that tells the history of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict through the experience of two families who lived in the same house
before and after 1948.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and a
consultant on national and international affairs. She is the former Lt.
Governor of Maryland and served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the
United States. She founded the Maryland Student Service Alliance to make
Maryland the first state to require service as a condition of Graduation. She
founded the Robert Kennedy Human Rights Award and has been the Chair of the
Robert Kennedy Memorial. At the Mesa Refuge she will work on a book calling for
a revival of the Social Gospel.

Kimery Wiltshire
Kimery Wiltshire is President of Exloco,
where she leads the team that developed projects such as the Western Water
Alliance, the Diversity Network Project, and Resources for Community
Collaboration. For the past decade, Kimery has also served as Executive
Director and board member of the William C. Kenney Foundation, a private
foundation working to protect rivers in the West. She has served as a project
director, consultant and grantmaker for a number of other environmental
organizations including: Californians and the Land, a unified Arctic National
Wildlife Refugee Campaign, The Alliance of Ethnic and Environmental
Organizations, the California Center for Land Recycling, and the Unified
Endangered Species Act Campaign.

Rosalie Winard

Rosalie Winard is an award-winning photojournalist based in New York whose work
has been published in ArtForum, Time, The New York Times, Le Monde, Forbes, US
News and been shown on “60 Minutes.” At the Mesa Refuge, Rosalie will be
writing the essay for Avian Primitives: Large Birds of the Wetlands, her
upcoming photographic book and touring exhibit promoting the awareness and
conservation of large birds and their habitats in North America.

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine leads community workshops on issues such as permaculture,
urban gardening, water and restoration with San Francisco Bay Area non-profit
organizations such as Urban Wilds Project, the Ecology Center, Literacy for
Environmental Justice and the Native American Farmers’ Association. Cleo is
completing a book project called The Water Underground: How to Disengage from
the Water Grid, an anthology of writings, drawings and photographs that
investigate the economic and environmental impact of water consumption.

Edward C. Wolf

Edward C. Wolf has written or edited several books on people and living
resources in the Pacific Northwest including Klamath Heartlands: A Guide to the
Klamath Reservation Forest Plan (forthcoming), Salmon Nation, and A Tidewater
Place. At the Mesa Refuge, he will work on a memoir titled How Marvejols Found
Us: A Family Year in France, a “why-to” book that links cross-cultural
experience with sustainability concerns.

Marc Zegans

Marc Zegans is a writer and management consultant. He served as Executive
Director of the Innovations in American Government program, a joint venture of
the Ford Foundation and Harvard University, from 1988 through 1995. He has
worked as a consultant to public organizations, foundations and international
donor organizations, including the Ford, Rockefeller and James Irvine
Foundations, the Carnegie Corporation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, since
1990. He is presently completing a book entitled The Essential Work of Public
Management.

Seth Zuckerman

Seth Zuckerman’s writing on the relationship between humans and the rest of the
natural world has appeared in numerous publications, including Orion, Sierra,
Whole Earth, The Nation, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, and Organic
Style. He is coauthor of Salmon Nation: People, Fish and Our Common Home, which
he edited with fellow 2004 Mesa Refuge resident Edward C. Wolf. At the Mesa
Refuge, he will work on a nascent book about the blind spots in many
environmentalists’ views of the world.

Spring / Summer 2003

Melvin Adams
Melvin Adams is a senior scientist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in
Washington State. He has published numerous technical papers relating to
nuclear waste disposal in arid environments. His avocation of creative writing
led to the publication of Netting the Sun: A Personal Geography of the Oregon
Desert by Washington State University Press and to publication of numerous
poems and essays. At the Mesa Refuge, Melvin will complete a collection of
poems, “Nuclear Zone,” reflecting on his 23-year career at Hanford.

Barbara Bamberger

Barbara Bamberger is an associate at Yale University’s Global Institute of
Sustainable Forestry and a consultant to the United Nations Development
Program. Barbara has worked on environment, land tenure and indigenous lands
issues in Latin America and Africa. At the Mesa Refuge she will write a
guidebook for the United Nations on women and energy that will explore the need
for women to be a critical component to rural energy planning in developing
countries.

Bill Bevis

Bill Bevis is a writer and retired professor in Montana. He has written books
on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Montana, Western writing, on a Death Valley
prospector named Shorty Harris (a novel), and on native resistance to the
logging in Sarawak. That book, Borneo Log, won a Western States Book Award. At
the Mesa Refuge, he will work on a book about Mongolia’s attempt to write land
use laws for a nomadic culture.

Ellen Bielawski

Ellen Bielawski is a writer and lifelong student of the circumpolar north. Born
and raised in Alaska, she has spent her working life in northern Canada. She is
the author of Rogue Diamonds: The Rush for Northern Riches on Dene Land (2003)
and of a peoples’ prehistory of Alaska, due out in 2004. At the Mesa Refuge,
she will be working on a new book about global warming and the opening of the
Northwest Passage, which she sailed 14 years ago.

Roohi Choudhry

Roohi Choudhry, a self-described “lifelong nomad,” is a creative writer and
researcher currently based in San Francisco. Her writing draws largely from her
experiences growing up in Pakistan, Southern Africa and the Middle East.
Roohi’s work has appeared in publications such as Gowanus, Hyphen Magazine and
Bookslut.com. At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a novel, tentatively titled
“Black-booted Morning,” that will explore the question of intention versus
outcome in social welfare work, within the context of women’s rights activism
in Pakistan.

Steve Clemons

Steve Clemons is Vice President of the New America Foundation, a public policy
center based in Washington, DC that works to cultivate new voices and new
directions in public policy. Steve’s work has been published in the New York
Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New
Republic, and the Asian Journal of Political Science. At the Mesa Refuge, Steve
will complete an article on the environmental damage wrought by what he calls
“an incremental but clear corruption of Washington’s ideas industry.”

Melissa Estes

Melissa Estes is an environmental lawyer who has worked in environment and
natural resources for more than twenty years with environmental regulatory
agencies, Indian tribes, environmental advocacy organizations, and in private
practice as a mediator and attorney. Melissa became involved with Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility after her experiences as an employee
at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. At the Mesa Refuge,
Melissa plans to work on a book about the experiences of “whistleblowers” and
other persons of integrity in a corporate culture.

Bonni Goldberg

Bonni Goldberg is a writer and educator. Her latest book is Beyond the Words:
The Three Untapped Sources of Creative Fulfillment for Writers (Tarcher/Penguin
Putnam 2002). At the Mesa Refuge, Bonni will work on her new book, “Living
Democracy,” which will offer people ways to engage in everyday acts of
conscious citizenry. She will also begin a project that explores the zone
between the values and the practices of orthodoxy and liberalism in
Judaism.

Eban Goodstein

Eban Goodstein is a Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College in
Portland, Oregon. Eban is author of Economics and the Environment (John Wiley
and Sons: 2001) and The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the
Environment (Island Press: 1999). He is also the volunteer Director of Green
House Network, which educates the public about clean energy solutions to global
warming. At the Mesa Refuge, Eban will work on a report costing out the damages
from climate change in the Pacific Northwest.

Elizabeth Herbert

Elizabeth Herbert is a doctoral candidate in environmental studies at the
University of California, Santa Cruz and has written for The San Jose Mercury
News and The Ventana. She is interested in public policy affecting forested
coastal watersheds and their provision of high quality public drinking water.
At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a writing project exploring how coastal
communities shape forest management policies of local water utilities and
analyzing the outcomes of these policies.

Nancy Kelly

Nancy Kelly is a filmmaker and writer. Her work includes the PBS documentary
“Downside UP,” the feature film “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” and the
documentaries “Cowgirls: Portraits of American Ranch Women,” “A Cowhand’s Song:
Crisis on the Range,” and “Sweeping Ocean Views.” While at the Mesa Refuge,
she’ll be working on the manuscript for a work of creative non-fiction
currently called “When We Were Cowgirls” which will be published by the
University of Utah Press.

Mike Matz

Mike Matz is Executive Director of the Campaign for America’s Wilderness, a
national organization with offices in New York, Seattle, Portland, Washington,
DC and Durango, Colorado. He has worked in the realm of wilderness protection
for more than 20 years, with extensive experience in Alaska and the arctic. At
the Mesa Refuge, Mike will write a sequel to his 1998 article “The Domino
Theory: Rejuvenating the Concept of Wilderness in Today’s Political Dark
Ages.”

Carolyn McConnell

Carolyn McConnell is Senior Editor at Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, a
publication that explores strategic opportunities in the process of shaping a
more sustainable world. Carolyn has published articles and reviews in Yes!,
Salon, High Country News, Orion and the Baltimore Sun. At the Mesa Refuge,
Carolyn will work on “The Way Through: Memoir of a Claim to Place,” a memoir
about her family’s connection to North Cascade lands.

Natalie Smith Parra

Natalie Smith Parra is a writer and a long-time social justice activist. Her
work is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction’s health care issue. Natalie lives
in Los Angeles where she is at work on a book-length work of creative
nonfiction weaving personal memoir with the politics of the health care
industry.

Linda Breen Pierce
Linda Breen Pierce is a writer and speaker in
the field of voluntary simplicity. She is the author of Choosing Simplicity:
Real People Finding Peace and Fulfillment in a Complex World (Gallagher Press,
2000), winner of a 2000 Writer’s Digest Award for nonfiction, and a founding
member of The Simplicity Forum. At the Mesa Refuge, Linda will be working on
her new book, “Simplicity Lessons: A 12-Step Guide to Living Simply,” a work
that examines the personal, social and environmental implications of
consumption.

Aaron Sachs

Aaron Sachs is a writer and doctoral student at Yale University specializing in
environmental history. He is the author of the paper “Eco-Justice: Linking
Human Rights and the Environment,” printed in Worldwatch in 1995. At the Mesa
Refuge, he will be working on a book about 19th-century explorers who followed
in the radical ecological tradition of the scientist and abolitionist Alexander
von Humboldt.

Stephanie Sarver

Stephanie Sarver has spent the last six years working in corporate business,
and at the Mesa Refuge she will work on a writing project addressing “green”
business models, philosophies and practices. Stephanie’s reviews and articles
have been published in a range of journals and periodicals including Terra
Nova, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Agrarian Advocate. She is author of Uneven
Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing (University of Nebraska Press,
1999).

Richard Shelton

Richard Shelton has published nine books and six chapbooks of poetry, and a
memoir, Going Back to Bisbee, which won the Western States Book Award for
creative nonfiction. He has been nominated for a National Book Award and a
Pulitzer Prize. He is a Regents Professor in creative writing at the University
of Arizona. At the Mesa Refuge he hopes to write essays on his 32 years
directing writing workshops in Arizona prisons, and to work on a new book of
poetry.

Sarah Silbert

Sarah Silbert teaches creative writing and comparative religion at Vermont
Technical College and holds writing workshops in schools, libraries, jails,
hospitals and homes for runaway youth. Sarah’s work has appeared in
publications including Ploughshares, Hope, The Sun, and Agni. At Mesa, Sarah
will explore her lover’s struggle to survive leukemia while examining the
environmental impact of the medical waste industry.

Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith is interim Deputy Director of the Independent Press Association,
an organization of some 400 progressive periodical publishers. He is the former
publisher of Dollars & Sense and founder of the Campus Alternative
Journalism Project. Jeremy’s writing has appeared in AlterNet, Clamor,
Interzone, The Nation, Prague Post, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The San
Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, Z Magazine, and numerous other
publications. At the Mesa Refuge, he will focus on the nature of progressive
political commitment.

Greg Tuke

Greg Tuke is a life-long community organizer and the founding Executive
Director of Powerful Schools. This unique school/community change organization
has received state and national recognition for creating powerful learning
environments for public schools in racially and economically diverse
communities. At the Mesa Refuge, Greg will be writing about the lessons learned
in doing whole-school change work, and developing a strategy for students to
attain a stronger sense of a global identity and perspective.

Ann Wendland

Ann Wendland is Publicity Manager at the University of Arizona Press, Board
Chair of Kore Press, and a former park ranger. At the Mesa Refuge, Ann will
complete a collection of essays drawing from her experiences across the United
States seeking examples of people living in sustainable harmony with their
ecosystems. She hopes to tell stories “that show humans to be a beautiful, if
adolescent, evolutionary experiment.”

Zeus Yiamouyiannis

Zeus Yiamouyiannis is a writer, educator, and philosopher. He is a featured
author in Educating Tomorrow’s Valuable Citizen (SUNY Press, 1996) and has
written extensively on interpersonal conceptions of self worth modeled upon
nature and its relations. He is working to create, develop and articulate
transformed notions of learning, and to create a democratic and environmentally
friendly educational technology modeled on nature. At the Mesa Refuge Zeus will
outline positive alternatives to “spin” and PR around nature and education.

Summer/Fall 2003

Ed Ayres

Ed Ayres is Editor of Worldwatch magazine and began working in environmental
reporting in 1969. He is author of God’s Last Offer and has written extensively
for Worldwatch, The New Yorker, Time, Utne Reader, and the Washington Post,
among other publications. At the Mesa Refuge, Ed will work on a book about the
connections between individual health and the long-range sustainability of the
society we have created.

Evan Eisenberg

Evan Eisenberg is the author of The Recording Angel (McGraw-Hill, 1986) and The
Ecology of Eden (Knopf, 1998). His writing on nature, culture, and technology
has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, Natural History,
Discover, The New York Times, and other periodicals. At the Mesa Refuge, he
will be writing about music, sound, and nature.

John Felstiner

John Felstiner is the author of The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and
Caricature (Knopf, 1972), Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu
(Stanford, 1980), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale, 1995), Selected Poems
and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton, 2001), and co-editor of Jewish American
Literature (Norton, 2000). He has taught at Stanford since 1965, and is writing
a book on poetry and environmental awareness.

Lora Jo Foo

Lora Jo Foo is author of Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns, and Responsive
Human and Civil Rights Advocacy, recently published by the Ford Foundation.
From the age of 11, Lora worked as a garment worker in San Francisco’s
Chinatown. She is an accomplished attorney and advocate for worker rights, and
is also a nature photographer. At the Mesa Refuge she hopes to develop a book
weaving her nature photography in with stories about growing up in an immigrant
family.

Ed Grumbine

Ed Grumbine directed the Sierra Institute undergraduate wilderness field
studies program at University of Santa Cruz Extension for 20 years. A former
firefighter and park ranger, Ed has written extensively on environmental and
wilderness issues. He is author of Environmental Policy and Biodiversity and
Ghost Bears: Exploring the Biodiversity Crisis. At the Mesa Refuge, Ed will
launch into an “ecological memoir” focusing on how people and landscapes have
changed over the past 25 years on the Olympic Peninsula, the Colorado Plateau,
and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Arjun Heimsath

Arjun Heimsath is an assistant professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth
College. Arjun’s work with soils and erosion from field sites around the world
lead him to pursue a non-scientific writing project at the Mesa Refuge to ask
whether the Earth’s soils will continue to support us. His goal is to bring
scientific understanding of the Earth’s surface to broad audiences through
creative writing.

Leslie Jonath

Leslie Jonath is a book editor at Chronicle Books in San Francisco and author
of the children’s book Postmark Paris. At the Mesa Refuge, Leslie will work on
a new interactive children’s book entitled Play With Your World, an activity
book that will encourage families and children to engage, experiment and
explore the natural world.

Allen Kanner

Allen Kanner is a psychologist, writer and artist who recently created “Altars
of Extinction,” an exhibition creating sacred space for meditation, education
and remembering species that have gone extinct at human hands. Those altars
will serve as the basis for Allen’s new manuscript; at the Mesa Refuge he will
work to tie together the themes of extinction, globalization, and the
integration of the spiritual and political.

Matthew Lasar

Matthew Lasar teaches United States history at the University of California at
Santa Cruz. He is author of Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network
(Temple University Press, 2000), which chronicles the history of the Pacifica
radio stations up to the late 1960s. At the Mesa Refuge, Matthew will work on a
second volume, bringing his study of Pacifica history up to the present
day.

Betsy Leondar-Wright

Betsy Leondar-Wright is Communications Director at United for a Fair Economy
and is co-author of Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American
Wealth Gap. At the Mesa Refuge, Betsy will continue work on her new book, a
guide to cross-class alliance building for middle-class activists.

Toni Lester

Toni Lester is a writer, scholar and Associate Professor at Babson College in
Boston. She writes about the connections between sexism, racism and homophobia,
and at the Mesa Refuge she will be working on a research project about the
cultural implications of affirmative action. Her new book, Gender
Nonconformity, Race and Sexuality – Charting the Connections, is published by
the University of Wisconsin Press.

Frank Marquardt

Frank Marquardt is an editorial consultant and the Northern California Director
of the Overton Hayward Group. He has written for Kitchen Sink magazine,
co-authored the hypertext novel The Unknown, and contributed to The Natural
Step’s forthcoming Re-Shaping Business Through Nature, Genius, and Compassion.
At the Mesa Refuge, he will be developing a book proposal for a book that
explores relationships between sustainability, psychology, and capitalism.

Michael Nelson

Michael Nelson holds a joint appointment as a professor of philosophy and
natural resources at the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point. He is editor
of The Great New Wilderness Debate and author of Ojibwa Environmental Ethics,
both with J. Baird Callicott. During his time at the Mesa Refuge, Michael will
be working on the notion of a water ethic.

Mary O’Connell

Mary O’Connell is communications officer for the Joyce Foundation, which funds
efforts to improve the natural environment and quality of life in the Great
Lakes region. An award-winning journalist, Mary is the author of Welfare to
Work: What Have We Learned?, School Reform Chicago Style and Working
Neighborhoods. At the Mesa Refuge, Mary will work on a book exploring the
connections between Chicagoans and Lake Michigan.

Frances Ortega

Frances Ortega is a community educator at the Southwest Research and
Information Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she writes for the
publication The Workbook about environmental justice issues affecting people of
color communities in the Southwest. At the Mesa Refuge, Frances will document
stories of Chicana environmental activists in hopes of sharing a unique Chicana
perspective in the environmental justice movement.

Jennifer Osha

Jennifer Osha is a forestry technician, musician, researcher and writer working
with community-based organizations in West Virginia taking on mountaintop
removal mining in Appalachia. At the Mesa Refuge, Jennifer will work on her
novel, Green River, Coal Fish, a fictional book based on the everyday realities
of life in the coalfields of southern West Virginia.

Carolyn Servid

Carolyn Servid is co-director of The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. She is
author of the essay collection Of Landscape and Longing and co-editor of Arctic
Refuge: A Circle of Testimony as well as two other collections. While at Mesa
Refuge, Carolyn will be working on a new series of narrative essays that focus
on issues at the heart of community well-being and sustainability.

Michael Sherraden

Michael Sherraden is Professor of Social Development and Founding Director of
the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. His
book Assets and the Poor articulated the concept of asset-based anti-poverty
policy. At the Mesa Refuge, Michael will work on his new book, Assets and Human
Investment, which will place asset-based theory and research in social and
economic context, and look forward.

Warren Snow

Warren Snow is Manager of Envision New Zealand, an environmental planning group
that advises businesses and communities on eco-efficiency and sustainability
strategies. He is also co-founder of New Zealand’s Community Business and
Environment Centre. Warren believes there are system principles for
sustainability common to all communities. At Mesa he will explore these
principles and how they might lead to a roadmap to sustainability for local
leaders and their communities.

William Speed Weed

William Speed Weed is a writer of stories, plays and non-fiction. His work has
appeared in New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Popular Science,
Salon.Com, Mother Jones, The Washington Monthly and other publications. His
recent play “Errorism” envisons an alpha bomb that eradicates letters from the
enemy’s alphabet. At the Mesa Refuge, William will work on a creative writing
project about nature, science and knowledge.

Linda Stout

Linda Stout is a long time organizer for social justice. She is author of
Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons From Grassroots Organizing, and is
founder and Executive Director of Spirit in Action, which supports the
development of a movement of people unified by a vision of a world which values
and embodies love, equality, justice, nonviolence, spirit and respect for the
earth. At the Mesa Refuge, Linda will work on a writing project to communicate
the purpose of spirit-centered work in achieving social change.

Peter Thomson

Peter Thomson is a writer, editor and radio producer. He is Founding Producer
and Senior Editor of NPR’s “Living on Earth” and winner of 19 awards for
excellence in broadcast journalism. At the Mesa Refuge, Peter will work on a
book about Russia’s Lake Biakal, a pristine and isolated body of water where
development is beginning to encroach but which remains, as Peter writes, “a
place where there is still time to make the right choices.”

Susan Tixier

Susan Tixier is a longtime forest and wilderness advocate who served as
Executive Director for Forest Guardians, Colorado Environmental Coalition, and
Great Old Broads for Wilderness. At the Mesa Refuge, Susan will begin a book to
help readers reflect on their lives using springs in the Western United States
for their mirror.

Susan Tweit

Susan Tweit, after beginning her career studying grizzly bears and wildfires,
turned to writing to tell the stories in western landscapes. The author of
seven books and hundreds of newspaper columns and radio commentaries about
nature in the American West, Susan is currently writing two books aimed at
teaching ecology and sense of place to gardeners. At the Mesa Refuge she is
eager to start writing Sarina’s Whale, her novel for middle-graders.

Spring / Summer 2002

Jim Anthony

Jim Anthony was born in Fiji, and has lived in Hawai’i since 1961. Jim has
taught at the University level and worked as a consultant for the United
Nations University, Tokyo. His teaching, research and consulting work has taken
him to the Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand, what was the Soviet Union,
Europe, Malta, South-east Asia, and North America. Since 1990 Jim has been the
Executive Director of Hawai’i–La’ieikawai Association, a non-profit Hawaiian
cultural issues and environmental organization. At Mesa Refuge Jim will be
working on a monograph length essay on water issues in Hawai’i–and, if time
permits, he will be putting the finishing touches to a series of short stories
long in the making.

Glen Chamberlain Barrett

Glen Chamberlain Barrett teaches writing at Montana State University in
Bozeman. Glen is recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Rona Jaffe Foundation
Award for Writing and while at the Mesa Refuge will be completing a collection
of short stories. Tentatively titled An Insufficiency of Words, the collection
deals with people’s attempts to come to terms with each other and with the
western landscape they inhabit.

Ellen Bernstein

In 1988, Ellen Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, the
first national Jewish environmental organization. Her books Ecology and the
Jewish Spirit and Let the Earth Teach You Torah illuminate the ecological
dimensions of Jewish texts and Jewish practices. At Mesa, Ellen will be working
on Creation’s Soul, a personal reading of Genesis I, which reflects a deep
ecological and spiritual perspective.

Lauren Coodley

Lauren Coodley is a Professor of History at Napa Valley College where she has
worked since 1975, teaching courses that have included Children’s Literature,
Math Anxiety, California History, Psychology of Women and many others. She is
currently President of the Academic Senate at Napa Valley College and has been
working since 1996 on a reconsideration of the life of Upton Sinclair.

Christopher D. Cook

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning investigative journalist who lives in
San Francisco. He writes for Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, The Economist,
and The Nation, among others. He has written extensively on US agribusiness. At
the Mesa Refuge, Christopher will work on Food, Inc., which will examine the
food industry’s toxic impacts on land and nature.

Helen Corbett

Helen Corbett is a filmmaker, activist and northern scholar who spent two
decades working on beautiful, remote islands in the Bering Sea. She was
recently a fellow in the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics. Helen is
working on a book about cycles of resource extraction and exploitation in the
Bering Sea, weaving together environmental history with personal memoir.

Jan Deblieu

Jan Deblieu lives on the North Carolina Outer Banks. She is the author of three
books about people and nature, including Wind, which won the 1999 John
Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing. Her articles and
essays have appeared in many national magazines. She is at work on a book about
astronomy and the mind.

Alison Deming
Alison Deming is the author of Science and
Other Poems, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of
the Civilized World and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She also has edited
Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and co-edited with Lauret
Savoy the forthcoming nonfiction anthology The Colors of Nature. Her work has
focused on understanding and healing the wounded relationship between human
culture and the natural world. At Mesa she will be working on a memoir of
childhood that focuses on cultural identity. She is Associate Professor in
Creative Writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Torri Jon Estrada

Torri Jon Estrada is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Latino Issues Forum’s
Environmental Justice Coalition for Water in San Francisco. For three years, he
worked as Project Director of the Brownfields and Community Revitalization
Project at Urban Habitat Program. An accomplished writer for academic and
applied readers, Torri will use his residency at the Mesa Refuge to write a
feature length article on community issues and brownfields redevelopment geared
toward a broader audience.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi,
where she teaches environmental literature and creative writing. She is the
author of William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own
Nature, many essays and poems published individually, and a forthcoming book of
poems, Blue Window. She will be working on two new collections of poems while
at The Mesa Refuge.

Alex Frankel

Alex Frankel is a journalist and business strategist who lives in San
Francisco. He writes primarily about the outdoors and business, and where the
two subjects intersect. His work has appeared in Outside and The New York Times
Magazine. His first book, based on an article he wrote for Wired magazine, is
about the language of the marketplace. Corporate Graffiti will be published by
John Wiley & Sons in Fall 2002.

Barbara Gates

Barbara Gates’ forthcoming book, Already Home: Inhabiting What’s Here, will be
published by Shambhala Publications in 2003. She is co-Founder and co-Editor
with Wes Nisker of the international Buddhist journal Inquiring Minds. As a
freelance book editor, her clients have included Howard Cutler for the Dalai
Lama (The Art of Happiness) and Sharon Salzberg (Lovingkindness). She will use
her time at Mesa to work on Already Home.

Daniel B. Gold

Daniel B. Gold is a film and television Producer, Director and Cinematographer.
Gold recently won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival for his work on the
documentary “Blue Vinyl.” Gold is currently working on three documentaries:
“Waiting to be Sung,” about the stories of country music songwriters; an
historical film on Sacco and Venzetti; and a film about one of Florida’s most
vibrant and soulful retirement communities- Kings Point. At the Mesa Refuge,
Gold plans to continue his research and development for “Salt Wars,” a new
feature documentary examining the politics of industry-sponsored-science and
its influence on federal regulations, public policy, and the balance between
profit and health.

Ken Lamberton

Ken Lamberton’s writing on the desert southwest has appeared in numerous
literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Editors have nominated two of
his essays for Pushcart Prizes, and Robert Atwan of The Best American Essays
series listed Ken’s work in “Notable Essays of 1998” and again in “Notable
Essays of 1999.” In January 2000, Mercury House published his first book,
Wilderness and Razor Wire, to critical acclaim, including the 2002 John
Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. While at the Mesa Refuge, Ken
will write about the Santa Cruz River.

Margaret Juhae Lee

Margaret Juhae Lee’s articles have appeared in The Nation, Newsday, Elle,
ARTnews, MAMM, The Advocate, VIA, A.Magazine, and other publications. She is
currently at work on a book titled “Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History,”
about the search for information about her grandfather, who was a student
revolutionary in colonial Korea. She is the former assistant literary editor at
The Nation and a 1999-2000 recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe
Insitute of Advanced Study.

Anne Mavor

Anne Mavor is an essayist and nonfiction writer living in Portland, Oregon. For
the past three years she has been involved in the growth of Keepers of the
Waters, an organization that supports natural and artistic water treatment
systems called living water gardens. At the Mesa Refuge, she will write an
essay about the cultural aspects of water and begin work on a practical manual
for people interested in bringing living water gardens to their
communities.

Susan Naimark

Susan Naimark is the Executive Director of the Development Leadership Network,
a national membership organization that supports individuals working in
community economic development to connect their work to broader social justice
organizing. Over the past two years, DLN has focused regional dialogues,
national convenings and workshops on the continuing impact of institutional
racism on community development. At Mesa Refuge, Susan will synthesize and
document her personal reflections on DLN’s findings, learnings and challenges
from these activities and the transformational work of becoming an anti-racist
organization.

Tommy Petersen

Tommy Petersen is Development Director of Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads
(Wildlands CPR), a national organization based in Missoula, Montana. Wildlands
CPR works to protect and restore wildland ecosystems by preventing and removing
roads and limiting motorized recreation. His road-ripping articles have
appeared in Orion Afield and other publications, and he will concentrate his
time at the Mesa Refuge on his current book project, The Roads Not Taken.

Marilyn Sewell

Marilyn Sewell is Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Church in Portland,
Oregon, a congregation of 1,600 members. Sewell’s sermons emphasize systemic
change; in particular, her work addresses economic inequity and all its related
ills. In 2001, Marilyn’s book Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic
Childhoods was published by Beacon Press. She is currently working on two
projects addressed to young adults, including a collection of memoir about
childhood experiences of race.

Marilyn Berlin Snell

Marilyn Berlin Snell is a writer and editor at Sierra Magazine in San
Francisco. At Sierra, she writes feature-length profiles of people not usually
associated with the environmental movement but who are nonetheless doing
incredible, courageous work to protect places they love. She has also produced
special issues of Sierra on biotechnology and energy. Snell’s wide-ranging work
has appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, and many other
publications. At the Mesa Refuge, she will be focusing on an article about
Cuban science fiction writers she has interviewed who deal with the ironies and
paradoxes of Cuba.

Louise Steinman

Louise Steinman is a journalist and the author, most recently, of The Souvenir:
A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War (Algonquin, 2001), based on her father’s
letters from the Pacific War. Her work frequently addresses issues of memory,
history and reconciliation. As Cultural Programs Director for the Los Angeles
Public Library, she curates literary and lecture series that stimulate public
discussion. She is working on a series of essays based on travel to Poland,
centering on the Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, sponsored by
the Zen Peacemaker Community.

Lynne Twist
Lynne Twist’s thirty-year career in service of
her commitment to ending world hunger, preserving the natural environment, and
unleashing the power of women has been expressed in her career as a master
fundraiser, a fundraising consultant and coach to individuals and
organizations. She is now completing the manuscript on her first book, The Soul
of Money, which offers a way to redesign our relationship with money, to find a
new freedom, truth, joy and power in the way we earn, save, share and spend the
money which flows through our lives. It will be published in early 2003 by W.W.
Norton.

Summer/Fall 2002

Michael Ableman

Michael Ableman is a farmer and director of the Center for Urban Agriculture at
Fairview Gardens, one of the oldest organic farms in California. He is the
author of From the Good Earth (Abrams, 1993) and On Good Land (Chronicle Books,
1998) and the subject of the PBS film “Beyond Organic.” Ableman is currently
farming a small piece of land on an island in British Columbia, and is working
on a new book profiling innovative farmers across North America.

Judith Arcana

Judith Arcana is a writer of poetry and prose. She has published in journals
such as Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, Bridges, and Calyx. Among her prose
books is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography. At the Mesa Refuge,
she work on a set of poems provoked by corporate biotechnology. Judith lives in
Oregon, and is a member of The Union Institute’s doctoral faculty.

Dennis Bernstein

Dennis Bernstein is host and producer of Flashpoints, an award-winning news
magazine on Pacifica radio. Bernstein’s articles and essays have appeared in
major newspapers and periodicals. For 12 years, Bernstein taught writing in
poor neighborhoods and prisons in New York City. At the Mesa Refuge, he will
integrate stories, poems and experiences from his troubled former students into
a new book called Clenched Fists & Love Songs.

Caroline Casey

Caroline Casey is a “visionary activist astrologer” who integrates political
action, humor, and spirituality in her live weekly radio show on KPFA. Casey is
author of Making the Gods Work For You: The Astrological Language of the Psyche
(Harmony Books/ Random House) and has written columns for Washingtonian and
George. At the Mesa Refuge, Casey will work on her new book, The Compassionate
Trickster Handbook, which she describes as “a guide to the transformation of
tyranny into rich compost for the new emergent culture we are growing.”

Elisabeth Finch

Elisabeth Finch is a playwright who focuses on female strength and faith in the
face of political and social injustice. Finch’s full-length script, But Dust
and Ash, focused on women’s resistance movements during the Holocaust and
received two Carnegie Mellon research grants, the National Playwriting Award
from Wichita State University and was produced at the Midwestern Kennedy Center
American College Theater Festival. At the Mesa Refuge, she will pursue a stage
adaptation of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge.

Lisa Hamilton

Lisa Hamilton is a photographer and writer based in Mill Valley, California.
She is currently working on a series of photos and essays documenting the farms
around her in Marin County. Her writing about sustainable agriculture has
appeared in publications including National Gegraphic Traveler, Z Magazine, and
Gastronomica. At the Mesa Refuge, she will be writing an essay calling for a
long overdue alliance between environmentalism and agriculture.

Stephanie Hamilton

Stephanie Hamilton has written for Parenting, Essence, News Watch and Sierra
magazines. She is author of It’s About Time (GirlSource, 2000), a resource book
for urban young women, and The Whole Parenting Guide (Broadway Books, 1999), a
book for new parents about holistic childrearing. At the Mesa Refuge, Hamilton
will begin work on War Stories: The Skeptics’ Scrapbook of the War on
Terrorism, which will prompt young readers to think critically about peace,
justice and U.S. foreign policy.

Marc Herman

Marc Herman is a freelance writer from California. His first book, Searching
for El Dorado, will be published in January, 2003 by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
The book looks at power, global capitalism and contemporary gold miners in the
Amazon. At the Mesa Refuge, Herman will be starting his second book, which is
about democracy movements in Indonesia.

Jessica Hurley

Jessica Hurley is an author with two new books out this year: Burn this Book
(Andrews McMeel, 2002) and One Makes the Difference (HarperCollins, 2002),
which she co-authored with Julia Butterfly Hill. Hurley has written for several
print, television and web outlets, including Oxygen Media, KBHK-TV and
Chronicle Books. At the Mesa Refuge, Hurley will write an investigative piece
on the gross chemical contamination recently suffered by workers in the
Beaverton, Oregon View-Master/Mattel toy manufacturing company where Hurley
herself was employed.

Jim Jontz

Jim Jontz is Executive Director of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the
Environment (ASJE), a labor-environmental coalition seeking to create a world
where “nature is protected, the worker is respected, and corporate power is
rejected.” Jim is a recovering politician, having served 12 years in the
Indiana General Assembly and six in the U.S. Congress. He also headed the
Citizens Trade Campaign, American Lands, and Americans for Democratic Action.
At the Mesa Refuge, he will be writing about the work of ASJE.

Elin Kelsey

Elin Kelsey is a natural history and science writer specializing in wildlife
conservation and global issues. Her work appears in magazines such as New
Scientist and BBC Wildlife. She is the author of eight books and is thoroughly
enjoying her current project — a children’s non-fiction book on Canadian
dinosaurs. At the Mesa Refuge, Kelsey will be working on a book that deals with
the implications of globalization on motherhood.

Nancy Lord

Nancy Lord lives in Homer, Alaska, where she writes, fishes commercially for
salmon, and is active in marine conservation issues. Her most recent books are
Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast (Counterpoint Press, 1999) and The Man
Who Swam with Beavers (Coffee House Press, 2001). She is currently at work on a
nonfiction book called Beluga Days: Among the White Whales of Alaska’s Cook
Inlet.

Gregory McNamee

A writer, editor, and publisher, Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of 21
books, among them American Byzantium (University of New Mexico Press, 2001),
Blue Mountains Far Away (The Lyons Press, 2000), The Mountain World (Sierra
Club/Random House, 2000) and Gila: The Life and Death of an American River
(Crown Publishers, 1994). At the Mesa Refuge he will work on a book about the
modern Mountain West, Closing Time in Pie Town.

Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body: Essays (Sarabande Books,
2002). Her writing has won three Pushcart Prizes in creative nonfiction, and
she is currently at work on a second collection of essays which will include
reflections on lessons learned from eco-friendly, cooperative projects of the
1960s era. She is an assistant professor of English at Western Washington
University and the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review.

David Minkow

David Minkow is a producer with KQED-FM’s Forum, a daily public affairs program
on the San Francisco public radio station. He is also co-founder of “The Soup,”
a five-day community fundraiser that focuses on shared resources. At the Mesa
Refuge, Minkow will work on a book about The Soup’s model of tapping community
and individual potential to build a sustainable year-round community that
fosters human and nature-based connections.

Alan Rabinowitz

Alan Rabinowitz is finishing a chronicle of the conflicting political and
economic forces that transformed the America city of 1900 into the “barely
governable and relatively inequitable metropolises of today.” The subjects of
his earlier books reflect his professional and professorial experiences in land
economics, state and local finance, and social change philanthropy. He and his
wife live in Seattle.

Victoria Schlesinger

Victoria Schlesinger is a free-lance writer whose years of research in northern
Central America fuel her work. Schlesinger is author of Animals and Plants of
the Ancient Maya: A Guide, which was published this year by University of Texas
Press and includes almost 100 essays describing the natural history and
cultural significance of species commonly seen in the Maya area. Her new
project is a collection of first-person essays recounting her adventures with
wildlife (notably with a jaguar) and people of the Maya area.

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is an essayist and activist whose work focuses on landscape and
place. Her books include Wanderlust: a History of Walking, and Hollow City: The
Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. A journalist for
Sierra magazine, she also serves on the board of Citizen Alert, Nevada’s
grassroots environmental organization. At the Mesa Refuge, Solnit will work on
a book in collaboration with photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, who are
re-photographing nineteenth-century and modernist photographs in Yosemite.

Jilann Spitzmiller

Jilann Spitzmiller is a filmmaker, writer and painter whose work focuses on the
spontaneity and mystery of life, and our connection with the natural world. Her
acclaimed documentary, “Homeland,” following the lives and dreams of four
Native American families, aired nationally on PBS in 2000 and won several
festival awards. She has received grants from the Sundance Institute, CPB and
the Independent Television Service. She is currently developing a television
drama series about a group of environmental activists, and will be working on
the pilot script during her Mesa retreat.

Alex Steffen

Alex Steffen is a freelance writer and journalist whose work on environmental,
political and cultural issues has been published in the New York Times
Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. Steffen spent the first five months of this year traveling
from the shores of the Mississippi to the sprawl of Phoenix, to research his
new book Wild Green Yonder: Travels Across America in Search of a Sustainable
Future. At the Mesa Refuge, he will write stories from his travels that
illuminate real-life sustainable solutions.

Carol Steinfeld

Carol Steinfeld is a freelance writer and program designer with a focus on
ecological solutions. She is co-author of The Composting Toilet System Book
(Chelsea Green), and has written articles for The Boston Globe, Natural Home,
Mother Earth and Biocycle magazines. At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on her
next book, Reusing the Resource: Adventures in Wastewater Recycling, a book of
profiles of water-reuse solutions worldwide. She is based in Concord,
Massachusetts, where she directs the Center for Ecological Pollution Prevention
and promotes composting.

Geri Unger

Geri Unger is co-director of Funders’ Environment and Education, a non-profit
organization building philanthropic interest in place-based learning. She is
also a consultant to foundations, non-profits and businesses in economically
feasible environmental development. At the Mesa Refuge she will work on essays
about finding a natural, safe space amid the clutter of urbanization,
cyberspace, and violence.

Ann Vileisis

Ann Vileisis is an independent scholar and writer. Her first book, Discovering
the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Island Press, 1997),
received top honors from the American Historical Association and the American
Society for Environmental History. At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a book
about how Americans lost the knowledge that their food comes from nature and
what this means to our spirits, our health, and our lands.

Spring / Summer 2001

Linda Baker

Linda Baker is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work
focuses on the changing status of the American family, land use and
transportation planning and the environment. Baker’s essays have appeared in
Sierra, E, The Progressive, Utne Reader and many other publications. At the
Mesa Refuge, Baker will expand an essay entitled Sprawl: Soccer Moms Public
Enemy #1 with the goal of examining sprawl and New Urbanism in a larger context
of family, community building and the erosion of public institutions.

Chris Benner

Chris Benner is a Research Associate at Working Partnerships USA, a
Post-Graduate Researcher at the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an Assistant Professor at
Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on the relationship between
development in information technologies and transformation of work and
employment. He has written extensively on labor issues. At the Mesa Refuge he
will work on his new book, Flexible Work in the Information Economy, to be
published by Blackwell Press in 2002.

Kate Boyes

Kate Boyes is Director of Utah Writers, a non-profit organization serving
Utah’s literary community. Her nature writings have been anthologized in
American Nature Writing, Fortitude, Higher Education: a Reader for College
Lives and Blending Genre, Altering Style. At the Mesa Refuge, Boyes plans to
work on Go by the Wayside, a collection of literary nonfiction focusing on
interactions between humans and the natural environment. Boyes is trying to
find points of balance between what the modern world offers and what it has, to
its own detriment, left behind.

Koben Christianson

Currently based in Switzerland, Koben Christianson is a Program Officer with
the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. His recent focus has
been on writing a report that outlines how to enable sustainability through the
market. While at the Mesa Refuge, he will prepare an article that summarizes
the findings of the report and draft a workplan for his forthcoming research
into market framework conditions. Christianson’s earlier writings include
Sustainable Development, Society and the Environment: A Conceptual Framework
for Tracking the Linkages, a report he co-authored for the European
Commission.

Claire Cummings

Journalist Claire Hope Cummings is working to restore agriculture to its
environmental roots and to educate the general public about the food system.
She writes for news services, periodicals, web sites, and activist
organizations and is food and farming editor at KPFA Radio in Berkeley where
she produces and hosts a weekly talk radio show. She has farmed in California
and in Vietnam and practiced environmental and native land rights law for
twenty years before turning to journalism as a vehicle for social change. At
the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a book about how we feed ourselves entitled
Rethinking Agriculture.

Edith Eddy

Edith Eddy is the Executive Director of the Compton Foundation in Menlo Park,
California, which makes grants in the areas of peace and security, population
and family planning, and the environment. She is a Board member of the National
Wildlife Refuge Association and the Robert Brownlee Foundation for
environmental education. Before entering the field of philanthropy, Eddy was an
instructor of Biology at Swarthmore College. At the Mesa Refuge, Eddy will
undertake a writing project on the body burden of chemical pollution that has
been linked to rapidly decreasing fertility rates throughout the world.

Larry Gonick

Larry Gonick dropped out of math graduate school in 1972 to become a
cartoonist, a profession he says seemed more relevant at the time. He is the
author or coauthor of a dozen nonfiction cartoon books, including The Cartoon
History of the Universe I and II, The Cartoon History of the United States, and
a Cartoon Guide science series (Physics, Genetics, Statistics, the Environment,
(non)Communication, etc.). A former contributing editor of Discover magazine,
he is currently staff cartoonist for Muse magazine and hard at work on Book III
of The Cartoon History of the Universe.

Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde currently holds the position of Richard L. Thomas Professor of
Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. His published work
includes Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) and the
poetry volume This Error is the Sign of Love (1988). At the Mesa Refuge, Hyde
hopes to develop a modern American model for what he dubs the cultural commons.
This concept has grown out of Hyde’s earliest book, 1983’s The Gift, which
explored the relationship between creative artists and our commercial
society.

John Kachuba

John Kachuba is co-author of the non-fiction book Why Is This Job Killing Me?
(1999) which sought to create awareness about the tragic state of occupational
safety and health in this country and worldwide. He is also co-founder of the
Alice Hamilton Foundation, which explores health and safety issues among
traditionally underserved populations, particularly women and people of color.
His new project, Sassamon, is a novel set in colonial New England that explores
race, power and King Philip’s War.

Peter Kahn

Peter H. Kahn, Jr. is Research Associate Professor in the Department of
Psychology at the University of Washington. He is also co-Director of The Mina
Institute (Covelo, California), an organization that seeks to promote, from an
ethical perspective, the human relationship with nature and technology. His
1999 book (MIT Press) is titled The Human Relationship with Nature: Development
and Culture. He is currently editing a volume with Stephen Keller titled
Children and Nature: Theoretical, Conceptual, and Empirical Investigations (MIT
Press).

Chris Kromm

Chris Kromm is director of the Institute for Southern Studies, a non-profit
research and education center working for constructive change in the region
based in Durham, N.C. For the past four years, he has edited the Institute’s
quarterly investigative journal Southern Exposure. He is currently working on a
book about the politics, economics and culture of the U.S. South, a subject he
has written on for Southern Exposure, the Raleigh News & Observer, and
other publications.

Jason Mark

Jason Mark, a San Francisco-based freelance writer, is the Communications
Director at Global Exchange, an international human rights organization. Before
joining Global Exchange, Mark worked as a reporter. His articles for Bay Area
publications have covered a wide range of issues, including suburban sprawl,
utility deregulation, education policy, and the environmental impact of North
Bay oil refineries.

Lisa Margonelli

Lisa Margonelli is a journalist and essayist whose work on women’s lives, art,
health and culture has appeared in Health Magazine, Wired, Mother Jones, Salon,
Jane and other print and web-based publications. Margonelli is presently
working on Simple Past, a collection of personal narratives about growing up on
a back-to-the-land farm in northern Maine during the 1970s.

Wes Nisker

Wes Nisker is the founder and editor of the international Buddhist journal
Inquiring Mind and author of the best-selling books Buddha’s Nature: Evolution
As a Guide to Enlightenment and Crazy Wisdom: A Romp Through the Philosophies
of East and West. For the past decade, Mr. Nisker has been teaching classes and
workshops in philosophy and meditation at venues worldwide. Before dedicating
himself full time to writing and teaching, Nisker was a radio commentato for
both commercial and public stations. His current project is a book entitled The
Big Bang, The Buddha, and The Baby Boom.

John O’Grady

John P. O’Grady teaches environmental literature and writing at Allgheny
College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

He is author of 1993’s Pilgrims to the Wild and co-editor of the anthology
Literature and the Environment (Longman, 1999). His newest book, published this
year by University of Utah Press, is Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar
Nature.

Todd Oppenheimer

A resident of the Writers Grotto, a San Francisco collective of free-lance
writers, Todd Oppenheimer is now working on a book about how technology is used
in public schools. The book is based on a 1997 cover story in The Atlantic
Monthly, which won Oppenheimer a National Magazine Award for public-interest
reporting. Oppenheimer has served as Associate Editor of Newsweek Interactive,
as an awards judge for Investigative Reporters & Editors, Inc., and in 1998
was named San Francisco Schools’ Volunteer of the Year. A journalist for more
than 20 years, he has won a variety of awards for his writing and investigative
reporting.

Ravi Rajan

Ravi Rajan is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at University of
California, Santa Cruz. While at the Mesa Refuge, Rajan hopes to complete his
book Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of British
Colonial Eco-Development, 1800-2000, a history of forestry. Rajan is editor of
Colonized Ecologies: The State of Nature in South Asia and Genealogies of
Environmentalism: Clarence J. Glacken on Nature, Culture and History.

Wolfgang Sachs

Wolfgang Sachs is a Senior Fellow at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate,
Energy, and the Environment. His area of interest is the politics and culture
of sustainability, both globally and domestically. He also serves as the Chair
of the Board of Greenpeace Germany. His book publications include For Love of
the Automobile. Looking Back Into the History of Our Desires (UCB Press, 1992);
(ed) The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Zed
Books,1992); (ed) Greening the North. A Postindustrial Blueprint for Ecology
and Equity (Zed, 1998); Planet Dialectics. Explorations in Environment and
Development (Zed, 1999).

Petr Sauer

Petr Sauer is Associate Professor of Environmental-Ecological Economics and
Policy and founder of the Department of Environmental Economics at The
University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic. Sauer is author of the first
textbook on environmental economics and planning in Czechoslovakia (1986) and
has written several research and teaching books. His latest work explores
voluntary agreements in environmental policy.

David Scheel

David Scheel is Assistant Professor of Marine Biology at Alaska Pacific
University. His specialty is the foraging behavior and habitat use of
predators, including African lions, killer whales and octopuses. He is
currently writing a book-length series of essays describing his Alaskan
research on Giant Pacific Octopi. The essays focus on nature and human
interactions, approached from scientific, mythical and cultural viewpoints.

Jan Sells

Sixteen years ago Jan Sells made a career change from teacher to
psychotherapist and completed her counseling hours at an inner-city junior
high, creating a program in crisis intervention and conflict resolution that
has gained local and national recognition and is still going strong. Through
U.C. Berkeley Extension, Jan teaches Effective Interventions with Adolescents
in Crisis each fall. To preserve her own mental health she likes to travel,
snorkel, dance, meditate, and write about all of the above.

Walter Thabit

For the past 35 years, in various planning positions and as head of his own
planning consulting firm, Walter Thabit has had a wide range of experience in
housing, renewal, community planning, city planning and anti-poverty projects
in local communities, cities and other civic institutions. Thabit is presently
authoring a book, Open Season, on the ghettoization of East New York, Brooklyn
in the 1950s and 1960s.

Leah Thomas

Leah Thomas is a writer, poet and visual artist residing in Oakland,
California. She began writing short stories at age 8, while growing up during
the psychodelic 70s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she
was born and raised. Her current work primarily focuses on using mental imagery
as a healing tool for various forms of abuse. She has completed a volume of
illustrated poetry, a book of short stories and is currently completing a
novel. Thomas also works with Oakland-based The Mentoring Center, a non-profit
organization that develops and disseminates models for effective programs to
mentor under-served and highly at-risk youth.

Summer/Fall 2001

Katie Alvord

Katie Alvord is author of the book Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair
with the Automobile (New Society Publishers, 2000). Her writing has also been
published in a variety of periodicals, and her work has included stints with
non-profit organizations involved in transportation reform, land preservation,
and other environmental issues. At the Mesa Refuge she will work on a
book-in-progress about land preservation.

Jim Barilla
Jim Barilla is a writer and restoration
ecologist who is currently working toward his doctoral degree at the University
of California, Davis. Barilla recently completed a non-fiction manuscript about
flyfishing across America. He is interested in the intersections between
ecological restoration, cultural restoration, and literature. While at the Mesa
Refuge, he will be writing about the role of ecological restoration in Native
American communities.

Linda Blachman

Linda Blachman is founder and Director of Mothers’ Living Stories, a Bay Area
nonprofit project helping young mothers with cancer record life stories and
legacies for their children. At the Mesa Refuge, she will work on a book
exploring the themes of mothering and mortality as they weave through the
collected teaching stories of project participants. Linda finds refuge from the
work’s inherent grief in nature, singing, humor and loving relationship.

Chuck Collins

Chuck Collins is the co-founder and Program Director of United for a Fair
Economy, a national organization concerned about income and wealth inequality
based in Boston. He is co-author of several books including: Economic Apartheid
in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity (New Press, 2000),
Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change (WW
Norton) and Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the American Wealth Gap. He is
working on a collection of essays and articles about social class and
inequality in America.

Eugene Coyle

Gene Coyle is a natural resource economist. Focused most recently on the issue
of electricity, he has advised the governments of Brazil and Australia and
several U.S. states on the folly of deregulating and privatizing. His larger
goal is reducing energy consumption while increasing equity, domestically and
globally. At the Mesa Refuge, he will write about cutting consumption and
regaining control of our lives and democracy through reducing hours of
work.

Tanya Dawkins

Tanya Dawkins is the senior vice president of the Collins Center in Florida,
where she heads up the Inter-American Forum, a new leadership and public policy
project dedicated to creating more prosperity for more people by promoting
effective and progressive leadership, social equity and economic/trade policy
innovation in the Americas. Dawkins is currently working on a book project
entitled The Global Economy: A Handbook for Humans, and is developing a column
and web series to showcase examples of inclusive global prosperity.

Kathleen Denny

Kathleen Denny deserted academic sociology to work as a machinist and airframe
mechanic. A member of the Machinists Union, she has been a participant in
campaigns for women’s rights, the environment, and solidarity with working
people. Her articles and commentaries have appeared in The San Francisco
Chronicle, NurseWeek, The Sun Magazine, and on National Public Radio. She is
working on a collection of stories which celebrate ordinary working people,
with moments of realization and action, big and small.

Mary Felstiner

Mary Felstiner is Professor of History at San Francisco State University,
teaching courses on biography and the history of genocide. Her book, To Paint
Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (HarperCollins, 1994; University of
California Press 1997), was awarded an American Historical Association prize.
At the Mesa Refuge her project will be to explore disability-rights concepts of
access in the context of environmental planning, as part of a book-length work
on disability and chronic illness, with the tentative title Journey around My
Joints: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis.

Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg brings 25 years of experience with the electronics industry to his
coverage of technology, society, and the environment in The Citizen Engineer
area of ChipCenter.com, an on-line trade publication for electrical engineers.
His articles on technology and the environment have also appeared in Electronic
Design and IEEE Computer Magazine. Goldberg’s book, Green Electronics/Green
Bottom Line -Environmentally Responsible Engineering was published by Newnes
Press in 2000. While he specializes in covering these issues for the technical
and engineering community, he is also interested in helping the general
population make informed decisions about technology and its impacts.

Kathleen Harrison

Kathleen Harrison is an ethnobotanist who studies the many ways that people
relate to plants, particularly as expressed in story, myth, art and ritual. She
teaches around the country and at Sonoma State University, and has written
about her fieldwork with indigenous people in Mexico and South America. Her
writing and photographs have been published in Terra Nova, Whole Earth Review,
and recently in the anthology The World and The Wild (University of Arizona
Press). Her time at the Mesa Refuge will be given to developing a book on plant
rituals and the worldviews they imply.

Mike Houck

Mike Houck, Urban Naturalist for the Audubon Society in Portland, Oregon
recently co-edited Wild in the City, a the first comprehensive guide to the
natural history of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. At the Mesa
Refuge, Mike will work on an urban river brochure series designed as a general
education and conservation tool. He is also writing a history of the Urban
Conservation program that he directs at the Audubon Society of Portland.

Emily Levine

Emily Levine is a self-dubbed stand-up commentator who uses humor to propel
serious social arguments. Levine got her start in stand-up comedy and
screenwriting, and her one-woman shows now integrate popular culture and
political debate. At the Mesa Refuge, Levine will develop material on economic
policy for her new show, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Free
Market.

Jason Mark

Eileen McNerney

Eileen McNerney is the Executive Director of Taller San Jose, a Santa Ana,
California organization directed to empowering immigrant and first generation
young adults from Mexico and Central America. At the Mesa Refuge, she will
begin to weave together a collection of stories, dreams, anecdotes and memories
from the young people she has counseled. This project will describe the
challenges that young people face related to acculturation and economic
survival in 21st Century America. McNerney hopes her writing will create a
framework for students to articulate their own experiences in print. McNerney
has been a nun for more than 40 years. She was named a State of California
Woman of the Year in 1998 and in 2000.

Ellen Meloy

Ellen Meloy is the author of The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in
the Desert Southwest and the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award.
Raven’s Exile, her account of living in a remote canyon on Utah’s Green River,
won the admiration of readers and river lovers everywhere. Her naturalist
essays have been widely anthologized, and she has written for Northern Lights,
Orion, and other journals. Meloy lives in southern Utah. Her new work of
nonfiction, The Anthropology of Turquoise, is forthcoming from Pantheon.

Susan Moir

After 15 years as a school bus driver, Susan Moir recently moved into the world
of academia. At the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Moir is the Director of
the Construction Occupational Health Program. At the Mesa Refuge, Moir will
work on a writing project addressing strategies for improving health and safety
conditions in the building trades in the context of a growing occupational
health movement.

Todd Oppenheimer

Christian Parenti

Over the last decade, journalist Christian Parenti has written extensively on
criminal justice and militarization in the US and abroad. Parenti’s first book,
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, was published in
1999. His new project is a book entitled Soft Cage: surveillance Past and
Present, about the history and politics of surveillance.

Amy Rawe

Amy Rawe is a freelance writer, editor, and photographer living in Camden,
Maine. Most recently, she worked as Associate Editor for Hope magazine, to
which she continues to contribute articles. Her writing has also appeared in
Ms. magazine, Down East, Seattle Time’s Pacific Magazine, Seattle Weekly, and
other publications. Rawe is working on a collection of essays, based on her
travels over the past decade, which explores how humans persevere despite
social violations heaped against one another.

Andrea Ross

Andrea Ross teaches English Composition at the University of California, Davis.
She also works with California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), a statewide arts
organization that places poets in K-12 classrooms. Currently she is
administering an NEA grant for poets-in-residence in fourth grade classrooms in
Davis. Ross’ current writing project is a poetry manuscript about women
adventurers in the Grand Canyon, which is based on research begun in 1991 when
she was a ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. Excerpts from this manuscript
were awarded the Celeste Turner Wright Academy of American Poets Prize in 1998,
and the Ellen Hansen Memorial Prize in 1999.

Shay Salomon

Shay Salomon is a carpenter, builder and teacher of natural building skills.
Salomon co-founded Women Build Houses, a builder network that offers workshops
and apprenticeships on sustainable home building. At the Mesa Refuge, she will
work on a collection of stories and advice from individuals and families who
live in small and efficient spaces. Salomon hopes to inspire mainstream people
to reconsider their needs when building their homes.

Judith Shaw

A writer and family psychotherapist, Judith Shaw is author of the 1997 book
Raising Low-Fat Kids in a High-Fat World (Chronicle Books). Her current project
is a book investigating social and health risks associated with Trans-Fatty
Acids and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils common in the processed foods
that increasingly fill American diets. Shaw calls Trans-Fatty Acids, promoted
and marketed by big business, the secret you are not supposed to know
about.

Betsy Taylor

Betsy Taylor is Executive Director of Center for a New American Dream, a
national organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland that promotes alternatives
to the more is better, consumption-driven definition of the American dream.
Taylor writes, our goal is to galvanize enough individuals and institutions to
help achieve genuine change. With Taylor’s leadership, the Center recently
formed a national network of municipal, county and state governments dedicated
to directing taxpayer purchasing dollars to environmentally preferable
products. She has published feature articles in numerous national newspapers
and journals and contributed to the book anthology, The Consumer Society,
published by Beacon Press.

Gary Whitehead

Gary J. Whitehead is a poet, high school English teacher, and publisher of
Defined Providence Press. Whitehead is author of two chapbooks of poetry, both
winners of national competitions. His first full-length poetry collection,
Climbing the Tree of Heaven Back Down to Earth, was recently accepted by Salmon
Publishing. Whitehead’s recent awards include a 2001 Individual Artist’s
Fellowship from the New York State Foundation for the Arts and a 2001 National
Endowment for the Humanities Institute Fellowship.

Spring / Summer 2000

Viveka Chen

Viveka is an ordained Buddhist, meditation teacher at the San Francisco
Buddhist Center, and Associate Director at the Urban Habitat Program which is
dedicated to building multicultural environmental leadership for socially,
economically and environmentally just and sustainable communities in the San
Francisco Bay Area. She is currently writing a book introducing a Buddhist
meditation practice that develops human solidarity and compassion in hopes that
it will be of practical and spiritual benefit to those working for social
change.

Corrine Asturias

Corinne Asturias is currently Managing Editor of Metro, an alternative weekly
newspaper distributed in Silicon Valley, California, where she works with a
staff of six writers and a stable of freelancers, columnists and artists. A
journalism graduate of San Jose State University, she has done media consulting
and editing for 15 years. Over the course of her writing career she has worked
as a news reporter and feature writer covering subjects such as courts, public
education and the environment. She also wrote a personal humor column, “These
Days,” which was published in six Bay Area newspapers. At The Mesa Refuge,
Asturias plans to author an in-depth article on the social and physiological
impacts of noise pollution.

John Baldwin

John Baldwin is an Associate Professor of Planning and Environmental Studies at
the University of Oregon. In the past he has served as the founding director of
the University of Oregon’s Environmental Studies Program and the Institute for
a Sustainable Environment. His published work includes Environmental Planning
and Management (1984) and Corporate Environmental Policy (1994). Baldwin’s
curent manuscript, Oregon Environmental Innovations, will provide a historical
overview of the state’s environmental policy.

Dean Crawford

Dean Crawford is currently working on two non-fiction projects: an article on
the Dunites, as longterm community of squatters who lived along the central
California coast; and a book on the efforts of certain extraordinary
indivicuals to study and save white sharks, including the work of researchers
at the Point Reyes Observatory located on the Farallon Islands. Dean has
written two novels: The Lay of the Land (Viking-Penguin, 1987) and Alamo Square
(just finished, no contract yet!). He teaches creative writing and modern
literature at Vassar College.

Topher Delaney

An artist and landscape artchitect, Topher Delaney hopes to use her time at The
Mesa Refuge to assess the proces of the past twenty-five years of work ö the
exploration of cultural and civic planning and zoning boundaries in the urban
and suburban context of the western landscape. Delaney’s recent commercial
projects include the Portland Art Museum, New York’s Beth Israel Hospital and
the Ruth Bancroft Garden. Her work has transformed the landscapes of a wide
range of public facilities, private residences and corporate properties, mostly
in the Western United States.

Elizabeth Herron

Elizabeth Carothers Herron teaches writing at Sonoma State University, in
Sonoma County California, where she is Professor of Arts and Humanities. A
published poet and fiction writer, she turned her full attention to
environmental issues in 1991, after a tragic toxic spill in the Sacramento
River. Herron’s published work includes the poetry collection The Stones the
Dark Earth (1995) and While the Distance Widens (1994), a book of short
stories. Her current manuscript is a collection of personal essays about the
human relationship to the natural world.

Jean Hey

Jean Hey began her writing career as a journalist in South Africa. Since moving
to America her essays and feature stories have appeared in major newspapers
including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Times of London. She has
had several short stories published and is now working on a novel, The White
Zulu, which is set in South Africa. Against a backdrop of extreme political
unrest and uncertainty, it examines the ties and strains of a multi-cultural
family trying to find its place – and peace – in a changing and often violent
country.

Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy has published seven books in several different genres. Her most
recent, a biography of a black American missionary and explorer, will be titled
Black Livingston: A True Tale of African Adventure. It is due from Viking Press
in 2001. Other published work includes the novel The Exes (1998) and the
nonfiction collection Pagan Kennedy’s Living: A Handbook for the Maturing
Hipster (1997). Kennedy has won many awards for her fiction, including an NEA
fellowship and a nomination for the Orange Prize, Britain’s highest paying
literary prize.

Perri Knize

Perri Knize is a long-time freelance environmental and investigative reporter
based in Missoula, Montana. Her articles have appeared in many national
magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, and Outside, and have been
reprinted in a number of anthologies. She has been a lecturer at the University
of Montana, and was a writer-in-residence on the Helena National Forest in
1998. She is a fellow at the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources,
where she is at work on a project to assess the quality of environmental news
coverage in the West. She is also currently researching the book she plans to
work on while at the Mesa Refuge.

Curt Meine

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist and writer based at the International
Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin. He is author of the biography Aldo
Leopold: His Life and Work (1988), editor of the collection Wallace Stegner and
the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape (1997),
and co-editor with Richard L. Knight of The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations
and Commentaries (1999). He is a member of the Crane Specialist Group of the
World Conservation Union (IUCN) and co-author with George Archibald of The
Cranes: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan (1996). He is beginning work
on a book exploring the natural and cultural history of the eastern White
Pine.

Roger Mills

Roger Mills, Chair and Co-founder of the Health Realization Institute, is one
of the pioneers in the development of a new resiliency based paradigm in
psychology. His research, supported by the National Institute of Mental Health,
the Department of Justice, HUD, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and major
private foundations, has contributed to turning around inner city communities
plagued with drugs, crime, welfare dependence and abuse. Mills is author of
Realizing Mental Health (1995) and co-author of The Health Realization Primer
(1998) At The Mesa Refuge he will write on the nature of wisdom as a dimension
of day-to-day living.

Joanne Mulcahy

Joanne B. Mulcahy teaches nonfiction writing, anthropology and gender studies
at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Her essays on culture and
ethnographic life history have appeared in various anthologies including
Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives and The Stories that Shape Us:
Contemporary Women Write about the West. She is working on a collection of
essays, Dreams of Martyrdom: Essays on Faith, Violence and Women’s Lives, based
on women’s experiences in varied cultural settings, including Alaska, Northern
Ireland, and Northwestern jails and prisons. Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan
Island, the biography of an Alutiiq healer, is forthcoming from the University
of Georgia Press.

Patricia Murphy

At the Mesa Refuge, Patricia Murphy will be working on a book of lyric and
narrative poems that focus on landscapes, both foreign and domestic, with great
attention paid to how families, friends, strangers and lovers interact among
the urban and rural, the domestic and industrial. She is a former editor of
Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her work has most recently appeared in American
Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review and
Indiana Review. She currently teaches writing at Arizona State University.

Lauret Savoy

Lauret E. Savoy is Associate Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies at
Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of geoscience research articles and
essays in environmental history and education, and is co-editor of Living with
the California Coast (1985). Savoy’s recent work appears in the forthcoming
book The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet. As a woman of
mixedblood heritage, Savoy combines research, writing, and photography to
examine connections and boundaries between cultures, individuals and the land
through time. Her goal is to produce multiple narratives of such edges and
connections, and the ideas that form them and arise from them ö from stories we
tell of land, its origin and history, to stories we tell of ourselves in the
land and of relational identity.

Andrew Sell

Andrew Sell is the Associate Director of International Exchange for the
Institute of Human Ecology, a Chinese non-government organization (NGO) that is
dedicated to issues related to the environment and sustainable development. At
the Mesa Refuge, Andrew will be reflecting on the environmental NGO movement in
China. Using IHE as a primary case study, he will analyze the often complex and
subtle barriers that hinder effective NGO work in China and look at the
interactions between business, NGOs and the government.

Delacey Skinner

Delacey Skinner is a freelance scholar and writer of essays, poetry, drama and
fiction. Her recent work has appeared in the South Carolina independent
newspapers The Current and Point. At the Mesa Refuge, Skinner will explore the
dynamic between the human spirit ö in particular our sense of self and
individuality and our ability to hear our inner teacher ö and the
capitalist/consumerist economy that dominates American society. This nonfiction
work will focus on how modern American capitalism affects our relationship with
ourselves, with others, and with the larger natural and spiritual world.

Edward Skloot

Executive Director of the Surdna Foundation in New York, Edward Skloot oversees
a $650 million family foundation making grants in the areas of environment,
community revitalization, creating an effective citizenry, arts, and
strengthening the nonprofit sector. His books include Smart Borrowing: A
Nonprofit’s Guide to Working with Banks (1990) and Social Investment and
Corporations (1989). At the Mesa Refuge, Skloot aims to step back from Surdna’s
varied grantmaking program and pull the threads together· to arrive at a
coherent, action-oriented synthesis.

Anna Sun

Anna Sun, a PhD candidate in sociology at Princeton, is currently working on a
novel entitled The Impossible. The story takes place in Beijing and Berkeley,
and it deals with the quest for the absolute in politics as well as in love. A
bilingual writer, Sun has a collection of short stories in Chinese, entitled
Scenes from a Banquet, forthcoming this year. She has been awarded the
Vogelstein grant for her writing in English, and she has also received
fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Conference.

April Thompson

April Thompson’s travel writing has documented her adventures through the
Americas, Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia for publications in the United
States (including the San Francisco Bay Guardian), Egypt and cyberspace. But,
she writes, a recent spiritual awakening has brought my notions of travel, life
and livelihood into question. It’s time to write about the journey beyond
motion, to the spirit-home. I hope my stay at the Mesa Refuge will help me find
the words to spark light in others and remove the stones from my own heart.

Amy Trachtenberg

Visual artist Amy Claire Trachtenberg’s recent public art commission was shown
on 24 kiosks along the main commercial artery of San Francisco for the Art in
Transit program. The series of collages Bodies Changed: A Natural History of
Market Street viewed the ephemera of contemporary culture edge to edge with the
buried bones and plants of former natural habitats. Pedestrians were invited to
travel back to the era when the former saltmarsh and sand dune environments
below their feet were active with animals and lush with reeds and grasses. At
the Mesa Refuge, Trachtenberg is developing a text-based poetry collage
concerning the effects of the ongoing and uncontrolled experiments on the human
body and the earth.

Nicola Waldron

Born and raised in England, poet Nicola Waldron has lived in the United States
for four years, in New England, Montana, and California. As an
Artist-in-Residence for the Putah Cache Bioregion Project this year, Waldron is
writing creative work on the culture and native beauty of the local watershed.
Concerned with identity and human and natural environments, she is completing a
collection of poems tentatively entitled Failure to Thrive.

Howard Winant

Howard Winant is Professor of Sociology at Temple University. He is the author
of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (1994), and the co author
of Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994).
He has also written a book on economic policy, Stalemate: Political Economic
Origins of Supply-Side Policy (1988). His work on race focuses on the
continuing centrality of racial identity and racial inequality in politics, and
on the way the meaning of race changes over time. He is completing a book on
the comparative historical sociology of race, with emphasis on selected
European, African, and American countries.

Nina Wise

Nina Wise is a performance artist and writer based in San Rafael, California
whose autobiographical works address the spiritual as well as social aspects of
contemporary issues. She has a degree in Religious Studes and the Aesthetics of
Movement, and has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, seven Bay Area Critics’ Circle Awards, as well as grants from the
California Arts Council and the Marin Arts Council. She has presented her
context-specific improvised performances in theaters and at festivals and
conferences in Asia, the United States and Europe.

Summer / Fall 2000

William Ashton

William Ashton is an environmental consultant who focuses on community-based
environmental protection. His projects include developing water quality
management plans for the Nature Conservancy, evaluating management of
sanitation systems in Alaska Native villages, and facilitating environmental
restoration advisory boards. Ashton will use his time at Mesa Refuge to work on
his first book, Living between Heaven and Earth.

Peter Asmus

Peter Asmus is an author and consultant who has written on energy and
environmental issues since 1987. His forthcoming book Reaping The Wind will be
published in October 2000 and is a case study of the fastest growing power
source in the world: wind power. Other books include Reinventing Electric
Utilities: Competition, Citizen Action and Clean Power (1997) and In Search of
Environmental Excellence (1990). Among his consulting clients are the Local
Government Commission, Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies
and Global Futures. At the Mesa Refuge, Asmus will work on a short story based
on fishing trips with family and friends. He describes this project as a
personal reflection on ritual, ethics and the our manufactured wilderness
experiences.

Jennifer Burkhardt

A student at Vermont Law School, Burkhardt’s primary interest is environmental
law with a focus in land conservation and urban planning. She is particularly
concerned with the adaptive reuse of historic structures for the benefit of the
urban poor. At the Mesa Refuge, Burkhardt will begin an article on inner city
historic preservation grants for low-income homeowners.

Jane D’Arista

Jane D’Arista is Director of Programs for Financial Markets Center, a former
instructor at Boston University School of Law, and from 1983 to 1986 served as
the Chief Finance Economist for the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on
Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance. At the Mesa Refuge she
will write about strategies for using newly-mandated pension funds in
developing countries to reduce disparities in income levels and promote shared
prosperity.

Dan Dagget

Author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book Beyond the Rangeland Conflict:
Toward a West that Works, Dan Dagget is currently running Ecoresults, an
internet catalog of ecological restorations for people interested in restoring
the health of ecosystems in the American West. Dagget will work on his newest
volume, Unmasking the Trickster: Getting Beyond Conflict to Effectiveness at
the Mesa Refuge. The book will discuss collaborative solutions to environmental
change.

Spencer Davis

Spencer Davis resides in Salt Lake City and considers himself the interesting
combination of economist and minimalist. As a Professor of Economics at Weber
State University, his passion is the subject of voluntary simplicity and the
economy. At the Mesa Refuge he will write an economics curriculum espousing the
approach of simplicity.

K. Lauren de Boer

K. Lauren de Boer is an essayist, poet, and editor. He has been Editor and
Executive Director of EarthLight, Magazine of Spiritual Ecology since 1995. He
is a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, Director of the
Center for Sacred Ecology in Oakland, and sits on the advisory board for the
Center for Ecozoic Studies. Born and raised in the heartland (Iowa), Lauren
currently resides in Oakland, California.

Bill Finnegan

William Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. He is
the author of four books, including Cold New World: Growing Up in A Harder
Country (1998). At the Mesa Refuge he will be working on a series of
autobiographical essays about tropical, preindustrial communities where he
states he had his assumptions tested and his ideas rearranged.

Grace Gershuny

Grace Gershuny is nationally known in the alternative agriculture movement,
having worked for over twenty years as an organizer, educator, author and
consultant, as well as a small scale market gardener. Her books include The
Soul of Soil, co-authored with Joe Smillie, and Start with the Soil. She was
also the editor of Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. For
five years Gershuny served on the staff of the US Department of Agriculture,
and was a principal author of the first proposed rule for the National Organic
Program. She teaches about gardening and food systems at the Institute for
Social Ecology, and is on the faculty of Goddard College, both in Plainfield,
VT. Gershuny is currently working on a book about the meaning of organic and
the process of bringing organic agriculture into the mainstream.

Jessica Govea Thorbourne

Jessica Govea Thorbourne was part of the founding group that organized and
established the United Farm Workers Union beginning in the 1960s. A Chicana who
began working in the fields of California at the age of four, she has dedicated
her entire adult life to labor, community and political organizing. She is
currently teaching workers and union leaders on behalf of the School of
Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in New York City. At the
Mesa Refuge, Govea will develop a primer on the basics of labor, community and
political organizing geared toward Spanish-speaking new immigrants to the
US.

David Helvarg

David Helvarg is the author of The War Against the Greens and is presently
working on Blue Frontier – The Fight to Save America’s Living Seas. An award
winning investigative journalist and former war correspondent in Northern
Ireland and Central America, he has produced more than 40 documentary reports
for PBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel and others. His print work has appeared in
Smithsonian, Sierra, The New York Times, and The Nation. Helvarg is a licensed
Private Investigator in California and Washington, DC.

Guy Lebeda

Guy Lebeda is a writer of creative nonfiction and the literary arts
administrator for the Utah Arts Council. His work has appeared in Tallahassee
Magazine, Salt Lake City Magazine, The Running Journal, and Valley Horse
Journal. His essay, Man of Letters appeared in the Norton anthology In Brief:
Short Takes on the Personal. During his stay at the Refuge he will be working
on a collection of essays about wild horses on the public lands of the
intermountain West.

Kathy McAfee

Kathleen McAfee is a scholar-activist with a PhD from UC Berkeley. Her current
research addresses biotechnology, food security, globalization, and
environmental justice. Her book, Selling Nature to Save It?, analyzes the
effects of neoliberal economics and intellectual property rights on
biodiversity. She is also author of Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and
Development Alternatives (1991) and many articles on community and
international issues. McAfee was a policy analyst for 10 years with Oxfam
America. At the Mesa Refuge, she will write short articles about the ecological
and social impacts of genetic engineering.

Donn Mitchell

At the Mesa Refuge, Donn Mitchell will work on a book-in-progress entitled The
Gracious Society: Frances Perkins and the Religious Vision of the New Deal,
which seeks to challenge the current dominance of economistic thinking in
social and environmental policy in the United States. Mitchell is Administer of
the Fellows Forum for the Episcopal Church Foundation in New York. In his work
with the Episcopal and Presbyterian communities, Mitchell has written on such
issues as worker rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the privatization of
social security.

Martha Olson Jarocki

Martha Olson Jarocki is Communications Director at the Urban Habitat Program,
which works to ensure the environmental and economic health of communities of
color across the San Francisco Bay Area. She is Editor of the journal Race,
Poverty and the Environment and a noted screenwriter, playwright and
documentary video producer. At the Mesa Refuge, Olson Jarocki will work on a
new book, Red Car Mysteries, a historical mystery novel about one woman’s
discovery of the story behind the dismantling of Los Angeles’ streetcar systems
in the late 1940s.

Kimberly Ridley

Kimberly Ridley is Editor of HOPE magazine, a solutions-oriented publication
highlighting people that are facing personal and societal hardships and
discovering solutions to overcome them. After a 15-year stint as a journalist,
Ridley will take some time at the Mesa Refuge to synthesize what we’ve learned
about solutions and the capacity for building alternatives to social problems.
Ridley plans to reflect on options for deepening HOPE and to write a series of
essays on the power of nurturance as a force for social change.

Ruth Rosen

For nearly 25 years, Ruth Rosen has written and taught courses on the
comparative history of women. As columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the
San Francisco Chronicle, she has written more than 150 opinion essays, most of
which address the political, social and economic rights of women around the
world. Her most recent book, published in February 2000, is The World Split
Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. At the Mesa Refuge,
Rosen will work on a new volume that addresses violations of women’s rights and
the challenging of global policies in an international arena.

Christopher Shaw

Christopher Shaw is a former editor of Adirondack Life magazine whose newest
book, Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip With the Gods, will come out in late
summer 2000. At the Mesa Refuge, Shaw is working on a volume about the Nunavut,
the new native province carved out of Canada’s former Northwest
Territories.

Gary Smith

Gary Smith is a professional educator who has spent the last eight years
managing environmental education projects for the California Department of
Education. A high school biology teacher for 24 years, Smith is working to
complete a book that promotes the use of systems thinking in education. He
hopes to convey a type of holistic thinking that provides both a grounding
metaphor for students to more accurately perceive and understand their world
and additional tools for students to carry with them as they leave school.
Smith will have a chapter entitled Systems Thinking and Urban Ecosystem
Education published this winter in the book Understanding Urban Ecosystems: A
New Frontier for Science and Education.

Donna Vitucci

Donna Vitucci is a freelance grantwriter for social and environmental
organizations who also serves as Communications Coordinator for her local
Cincinnati-area school district. Vittuci is using her time at the Mesa Refuge
to write a novel exploring her own family’s experiences with a now-defunct
uranium processing facility in Fernald, Ohio. Through the stories of her two
uncles, who worked at the plant, Vitucci hopes to create a work that is not
only of the environment, but a saga of deception, family, and worry within a
community.

Sam Western

A free-lance writer in Wyoming, Sam Western has published his work in Sports
Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, LIFE, Northern Lights, and E Magazine.
His 1998 article for the Economist, The Wyoming Paradox, documented the
economic stagnation and environmental degradation facing that state’s residents
ö and spurred a great deal of controversy among his fellow Wyoming residents.
At the Mesa Refuge, Western will begin work on a slim treatise expanding on the
article. The work is tentatively titled Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the
River: Wyoming’s Search for its Soul.

Evelyn White

Evelyn C. White is editor of The Black Women’s Health Book and author of Chain,
Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships. A Visiting Scholar at
Oakland’s Mills College, White has also written on Black women and their
relationship to the wilderness. At the Mesa Refuge, she is working on an
authorized biography of Alice Walker.

Diana Winston

Diana Winston is the founder of the Buddhist Alliance for Social Engagement
(BASE). A Buddhist activist, teacher, and writer, her published and unpublished
writings ponder the intersection of spirituality, politics, economics, and
desire. She is working on a book about her year as a Buddhist nun in Burma,
while reflecting on ethical responses to information technology gone awry.

1999 Residents

Stephen Altschuler

Stephen Altschuler has authored several works exploring “the interplay of inner
and outer landscapes.” Altschuler’s titles include Hidden Walks in the Bay Area
– Pathways, Essays, and Yesterdays and Sacred Paths and Muddy Places –
Rediscovering Spirit in Nature. His current manuscript explores terrain near
and dear to the Mesa Refuge; Just One Trail: One Man’s Ten Year Relationship
with a Wilderness Trail details Altschuler’s passages on a pathway in Point
Reyes National Seashore.

Anna An

Anna An is completing an MFA in Writing for Children and teaches history at
Berkeley’s Community School. An’s writing examines cultural memory and its
relationship to the natural landscape. She is completing a collection of
vignettes and short stories focusing on the sense of place – cultural and
physical – that continues to shape her identity as a first generation
Korean-American.

Dean Baker

An economist with the Economic Policy Institute and the Preamble Center, Dean
Baker recently published Social Security: The Phony Crisis and Globalization
and Progressive Economic Policy. Baker hopes to use his time at the Mesa Refuge
to reflect and write on strategies for creating a more socially equitable and
environmentally sustainable economic system.

Amanda Blake

Concerned with “strategic sustainability,” Amanda Blake fuses elements of
ecological economics, organizational development, and business strategy to
elaborate an environmentally sustainable brand of economic competition. Blake
studied the Ecology of Commerce at Schumacher College. Her work has been
published in An Exploration of Industrial Ecology and Natural Capitalism and
Harbinger Magazine.

Ann Boese

Ann Boese is a free-lance writer and the co-owner of Bone Island Press in Key
West. She is currently writing Death of Key West, which considers the social,
environmental, and economic history of the island and views it as a case study
on the effects of capitalism. Boese’s work has been published in Bone Island’s
Explore KW, the Miami Herald, Tropic Magazine, and Newsweek.

David Bollier

David Bollier has authored several books on public policy, corporate
responsibility, and the consumer movement. His works include Aiming Higher: 25
Stories of How Companies Prosper by Combining Sound Management and Social
Vision and Freedom From Harm: The Civilizing Influence of Health, Safety and
Environmental Regulation. At the Mesa Refuge this summer, Bollier will begin
writing on the political potential of cultural solidarity and “the untapped
potential and inherent limits of socially-minded business leadership.”

Andrew Boyd

An organizer, performance artist, and writer, Andrew Boyd explores “the art of
organizing” through various media. His published works include Daily
Afflictions: Self Help for the Skeptical Mystic, Life’s Little Deconstruction
Book, and The Activist Cookbook: Creative Actions for a Fair Economy. On leave
from United for a Fair Economy, Boyd will use his time at the Mesa Refuge to
reflect on human nature and the social justice movement.

Gray Brechin

A geographer and environmental historian, Gray Brechin is investigating Silicon
Valley development as a prototype for other human activities. He is author of
Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, out this spring, and
designer of the exhibit “Awakening from the California Dream: An Environmental
History,” currently up at the Oakland Museum.

Mary Clark

A study in human nature and the Western concept of “progress,” Mary Clark’s
current project boldly asks, Who Do We Think We Are? in a search for pathways
to social change. A retired Professor of Biology, Clark has authored Ariadne’s
Thread: The Search for New Modes of Thinking and Rethinking the Curriculum:
Toward an Integrated, Interdisciplinary College Education.

Trena Cleland

A peace activist and writer, Trena Cleland is concerned with cultural
sustainability. In Point Reyes this spring, she is working on a series of
articles inspired by her travels in Thailand and her participation in the
Alternatives to Consumerism Conference. Cleland’s work has been published in
the East Bay Express, Communities, In Context, the Mindfulness Bell and the
newsletter of The Progressive Way.

Betsy Damon

A writer, visual artist, and practitioner of Chinese medicine, Betsy Damon
founded Keepers of the Waters in 1990 to facilitate collaborations between
artists, scientists and citizens for the preservation of water quality. Damon
designed a Living Water Garden in Chengdu, China, which sets the stage for her
current writing project. Listen-Water, a work in English and Chinese, explores
the potential for cross-cultural environmental partnerships.

Michael DiLeo

A free-lance journalist, Michael DiLeo has written for Mother Jones, American
Way, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. His books include Two
Californias and Headwaters: Tales of the Wilderness. DiLeo’s current project
looks at the ramifications of “river revival,” exploring the movement to
“transform our control of Nature into more of a partnership.”

Dianne Dumanoski

More than a decade after first reporting the discovery of the hole in the ozone
layer, Dianne Dumanoski is engaged in a process of “Rethinking
Environmentalism” and challenging the framework of environmental debate. A
journalist, graduate instructor, and author, Dumanoski has written for The
Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix. Her 1996 book, Our Stolen Future, studies
man-made chemicals and their effects on human health.

Nora Gallagher

“We must have the courage to imagine a new world,” writes Nora Gallagher. For
Gallagher, the first step in this process is to recognize the
interconnectedness of religion, spirituality and environmentalism. Gallagher
has written for Patagonia, Life, and Time, and her books include Things Seen
and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, Notes From the Field, and Revelations:
Diaries of Women.

Jeff Gates

President of the Shared Capitalism Institute, Jeff Gates served as counsel to
the US Senate Committee on Finance in the 1980s, crafting much of the federal
legislation encouraging employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). Gates has
worked globally as an advisor on foreign economic reform, contributed to a host
of publications, and authored The Ownership Solution. At the Mesa Refuge, Gates
will explore “Third Way Politics,” outlining a green and just political agenda
for the next Presidential Administration.

Claire Greensfelder

Claire Greensfelder has been involved in social change work for nearly three
decades. A self-described “safe energy and peace activist,” Greensfelder
published The Safe Energy Handbook, distributed at the Beijing Women’s
Conference. Her current project, Looking for My Instructions, is inspired by
Native American teachings and searches for Western cultural and spiritual
connections to social movements.

Chester Hartman

An urban planner, author, and policy consultant, Chester Hartman is the
President of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. His books include
Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America, The Transformation of San
Francisco, and Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda. Hartman is working
on an updated edition of 1984’s The Transformation of San Francisco, which
details a history of development and neighborhood struggles in the City.

Maya Khosla

At the Mesa Refuge, Maya Khosla is completing a poetry mansuscript and a series
of essays on the Marin Headlands. Interested in human ecology, Khosla’s work
notes “ways in which people have viewed areas such as the Headlands as
important to their sense of place.” A writer-in-residence at the Headlands
Center for the Arts in 1998, Khosla is author of Web of Water: The Salmon of
Redwood Creek and the poetry collection Heart of the Tearing.

Alexander Lee

Alexander Lee is a law student and founder of Project Laundry List, which urges
people to hang their laundry to dry and conserve energy. His writing projects
include the autobiography My Apologies, the anthology Since Earth Day, a
collection of essays by environmental leaders born after April 22, 1970, and
Earth Civics, an environmental text for elementary school students.

Melissa Nelson

Director of the Cultural Conservancy, Melissa Nelson works in the areas of
biodiversity conservation, Native American environmentalism, ecopsychology, and
bioregional planning. She recently published A Psychological Impact Report for
the Environmental Movement. Nelson’s current projects include an environmental
autobiography and essays on Presidio watershed restoration and California
Indian leadership.

Judith Nies

A former congressional speechwriter, Judith Nies is a non-fiction author,
editor and teacher. She is author of Seven Women: Portraits from the American
Radical Tradition, a book of biographies of women activists, and Native
American History. At Mesa Refuge, Nies is working on The Black Mesa Syndrome:
Indian Lands Black Gold, a study of the social exploitation and environmental
destruction covered up by the Hopi Navajo Land dispute.

Vicki Robin

Co-author of Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money
and Achieving Financial Independence, Vicki Robin is President of the New Road
Map Foundation and a pioneer of the sustainable consumption movement. She is
completing Tales of Freedom, a collection of interviews following up people who
transformed their lifestyles after reading Your Money or Your Life.

Sarah Van Gelder

As Editor of Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Sarah Van Gelder explores
strategic opportunities in the process of shaping a more sustainable world. At
the Mesa Refuge, Van Gelder hopes to galvanize the ideas generated at this
year’s Positive Futures Network gathering of writers and activists.

Thomas L. Benson

Thomas L. Benson is the President of Green Mountain College, an environmental
liberal arts institution in Poultney, Vermont. He has graduate degrees in
philosophy and religion from The Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. He
writes on topics in environmental ethics, comparative philosophy and innovative
practices in higher education.

Charles Buki

Charles Buki lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He is presently working on a book
about poverty and architecture and commonwealth entitled Effect and Cause:
Poverty and Beauty in America. Buki works with the national Neighborhood
Reinvestment Corporation.

Chris Carlsson

The owner of a typesetting and graphic design business, Chris Carlsson is an
accomplished writer and editor whose work has centered on San Francisco’s
economic and environmental history – and its future. Carlsson is the Co-Editor
of the City Lights anthology Reclaiming San Francisco and the Co-Founder of
Processed World magazine. His current projects include a futuristic novel and
an essay on Bay Area environmental groups.

Ami Chen Mills

Ami Chen Mills states that the goal of her work is to “help people connect to
their natural, internal wisdom, which reflects the peace and grace and majesty
of nature.” An award-winning free-lance writer, Chen Mills has published work
in the San Francisco Examiner, Mojo Wire, Glamour and Inc. magazine addressing
mental health and the wholistic treatment method called “health
realization.”

Kimi Eisele

Kimi Eisele is the founding editor of YOU ARE HERE: the journal of creative
geography. A geographer and writer, she is currently writing a book about the
landscapes of children on the U.S.-Mexico border. Eisele lives in Tucson,
Arizona and is a graduate student in Geography and Regional Development at the
University of Arizona.

Robert Frenay

Robert Frenay is writing on the emergence of biologically-inspired design as a
solution to many of the environmental problems inherent in our industrial
culture. As he considers the merits of the movement dubbed “biorealism,” the
former Audobon editor is launching Lakeside, a 300-acre ecologically-designed,
“new urbanist” town in central New York State.

Joan Gussow

Joan Gussow is a long-time organic gardener as well as Mary Swartz Rose
Professor emerita and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at
Columbia University. Currently a member of the National Organic Standards Board
and the Board of the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation, Gussow has written several
books on agriculture and nutrition ecology. Her recent publications include
Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce & Agriculture, and The Nutrition Debate:
Sorting Out Some Answers.

Judith Helfand

Filmmaker Judith Helfand is the Peabody award winning producer of “Healthy Baby
Girl,” a film about DES-related cancer and the personal impact of toxic
exposure. Her current projects include “Wrapping Turtles,” a narrative
screenplay exploring class and success in the suburbs; and “Blue Vinyl,” a
documentary and “toxic comedy” about home, family, vinyl siding,
industry-sponsored science and the ecology of denial.

David Helvarg

David Helvarg is the author of The War Against the Greens and is presently
working on Blue Frontier – The Fight to Save America’s Living Seas. An award
winning investigative journalist and former war correspondant in Northern
Ireland and Central America, he has produced more than 40 documentary reports
for PBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel and others. His print work has appeared in
Smithsonian, Sierra, The New York Times, and The Nation. Helvarg is a licensed
Private Investigator in California and Washington, DC.

Edward Hoagland

A writing teacher and free-lance writer, Edward Hoagland has recently published
work in The Nation, National Geographic, American Scholar, and Rolling Stone.
He is the author of fiction and non-fiction alike, with books such as Tigers
and Ice, Balancing Acts, The Final Fate of the Alligators, and Seven Rivers
West. Hoagland will use his time at the Mesa Refuge to work on an update to his
1979 work African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan.

Amy Irvine

Amy Irvine lives in Salt Lake City, Utah and works for the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance as its Programs Director. She is also a freelance writer
whose creative work addresses the social meaning of wilderness. Her nonfiction
has appeared in publications such as Climbing. Irvine’s work will appear in
three separate anthologies this year.

Peter Kimani
A Kenyan journalist, Peter Kimani has
published articles on Kenya’s land-use conflicts for the last decade. His
current work includes a social and environmental review of the nation’s land
policy, surveying rampant forest destruction, wildlife preservation efforts,
the plight of landless squatters and the efforts of church and environmental
activists.

Dorothy Larson

Dorothy Larson is an Alaskan poet and activist who aims to bring a Native
Alaskan perspective to the environmental movement. Larson spends her summers
fishing in a remote village with her family.

David Rothenberg

In his book Sudden Music, David Rothenberg’s goal is “to use models from music
to enhance our understanding of our spontaneous humanity and the way it
connects to the natural world.” Rothenberg is a respected authority on deep
ecology and a jazz clarinetist known for his integration of world music with
improvisation and electronics. Published work includes Hands End: Technology
and the Limits of Nature and Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of
Deep Ecology.

Lansing Shepard

Lansing Shepard is a writer specializing in environment and natural history. He
is author of the Northern Plains edition of the Smithsonian’s Guides to Natural
America. Shepard is currently working on a four-part television series on the
history of Minnesota’s landscapes — a project that tells the history of the
state through the profound changes humans have wrought on its landscapes. He
calls it “history from the point of view of the land.”

Edward Tasch

Edward “Woody” Tasch concentrates his professional activities on the
“(dis)connection between financial markets and natural systems.” His work looks
at sustainability on the level of the household, the community, and the global
financial market. Tasch is founder of the Blue Dot Foundation in Nantucket, MA,
which combines grantmaking and investing in an entrepreneurial approach to
individual transactions. He is writing an epic poem addressing these
issues.

1998 Residents

Carl Anthony

Kate Brady

Edgar Cahn

Bill Carter

Melody Ermachild Chavis

Anne-Marie Cusac

John De Graaf

Pleasant DeSpain

Chris Desser

Ross Gelbspan

Judith Helfand

Mark Hertsgaard

Peter Holloran

Phil Klasky

Karen Lehman

Meredith Maran

Penelope Moffet

David Morse

Jim Motavalli

Vijaya Nagarajan

Lacey Phillabaum

Kim Roberts

Andy Robinson

Jonathan Rowe

Susan Schacht

Bill Shireman

Terry Tempest Williams

Jeannie Trombly