Board of Directors

Alison Hawthorne Deming (Chair)
Alison Hawthorne Deming is author of four poetry books: Rope, Genius Loci, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, and Science and Other Poems (which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets). Her three nonfiction books are: Writing the Sacred Into the Real, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Temporary Homelands. Among her honors: Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She co-edited with Lauret Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is Professor at the University of Arizona.

Marc Fasteau
Marc is a Managing Director of Fulcrum Partners, which develops hotels and insurance ventures, and the Founder and Chairman of the Board of the American Strategic Insurance group. Before forming Fulcrum Partners, he was a partner at Dillon Read & Co., a New York investment bank. From 1979 until 1982 he served as Staff Director and Counsel for the Rockefeller Foundation Study Commission on South Africa. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Male Machine.

Carolyn Finney
A geographer in Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, Carolyn Finney explores how difference, identity, representation, and power play a significant role in determining how people negotiate their daily lives in relation to the environment. Along with public speaking and consulting, she serves on national boards and committees including the National Parks Advisory Board, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Center for Whole Communities. Dr. Finney has written a number of essays; her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: African Americans and the Great Outdoors, is forthcoming (UNC Press).

William L. Fox
William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published fourteen books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Fox has researched and written books set in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the deserts of Chile, Australia, and the United States. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, the Australian National University, and National Museum of Australia, and twice been a Lannan Writer-in-Residence.

Wendy Tarlow Kaplan
Wendy Tarlow Kaplan’s career has been in the fine arts, having trained in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; worked at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University as assistant curator in the Print Department; curator at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury; curator of the Eighth Triennial at the Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton; curator at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. She organized and produced international traveling exhibitions, “From the Kilns of Denmark: Contemporary Danish Ceramics,” at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, and “Tiger by the Tail! Contemporary Women Artists of India Transform Culture,” which opened at Brandeis. Kaplan has served as art juror; written for Art New England; contributed essays on the Boston art scene for the New England Encyclopedia; and has memberships in American Museum Association, College Art Association, and ArtTable.

Margot Anne Kelley
Margot Anne Kelley is an educator, artist, and advocate. After earning a Ph.D. in American Literature from Indiana University, Margot taught English at the college level for more than a decade. She then returned to graduate school, earned an M.F.A. in Media and Performing Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and began teaching photography and art theory as well as actively pursuing her own art projects. Now, she blends those interests in her position as Interim Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, where she is also an Associate Professor of Critical Theory. Those efforts counterpoint her work as a founding trustee for the K2 Family Foundation, which is committed to promoting science-based art projects, increased access to education, and creative approaches to environmental sustainability. Margot and her husband, Robert, live on the St. George peninsula in mid-coast Maine.

Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, plant ecologist, writer and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her writings include Gathering Moss, which was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. Her interests include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Adela C. Licona
Adela C. Licona is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include cultural and gender studies, social justice coalitions, movements, and media as well as visual culture, community literacies, action research, and public scholarship. She is co-editor of Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward. Her book, Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric, was published in October 2012. Adela is Co-Director of the Crossroads Collaborative, which brings together stories and numbers through action-oriented research with academics, youth serving organizations, and youth from the community. The Collaborative’s work addresses youth sexuality, health, and rights, in order to increase understanding, amplify youth voice, and share what is learned with the broader community.

Anne MacDonald
Anne MacDonald served as the Chief Marketing Officer at Macy’s, Citigroup, and Travelers. She lives in New York City and northwestern Connecticut.

Kathleen Dean Moore
Kathleen Dean Moore is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University. She is the author of award-winning books of essays about our cultural, spiritual, and moral relationships to the natural world, including Riverwalking, Holdfast, The Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort, and edited volumes on Rachel Carson and Viola Cordova, an Apache philosopher. Her recent co-edited book, Moral Ground, identifies climate destabilization and other environmental emergencies as a moral crisis and calls for a global discourse about our responsibilities to the future. Her work appears widely, from Orion and Audubon to Environmental Ethics and the Journal of Forestry, and she speaks in a wide variety of national forums, often on the subject of ethics and climate change. Moore is founder and Senior Fellow of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. She and her husband, a biologist, live in Corvallis, Oregon.

Christopher Nye
A professor and then college administrator for many years, Chris instituted programs in place-based education and service learning. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. He is a published poet and the author of The Old Shepherd’s Tale, which won a Moonbeam Children’s Book Award. Chris serves as Vice President of the Myrin Institute and unofficial steward of its nature preserve.

Jonathan Prince
Jonathan resurrected his latent passion for sculpture in 2004 after a distinguished and diverse career in the arts and sciences. He completed a doctorate at Columbia University and postdoctoral studies at the University of California. He has produced feature films, directed numerous computer-animated special effects projects, and been involved in several large-scale technology and art installations at venues such as the Smithsonian Institution.

Scott Slovic
Scott is professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. A graduate of Stanford University (B.A.) and Brown University (M.A. and Ph.D.), he has been a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, Japan, and China. He has also been a visiting professor at Rice University, the University of Queensland (Australia), National Taiwan Normal University, Central China Normal University, Tsinghua University (China), and Rikkyo University (Japan), the École Normale Supérieure-Lyon (France), and Shandong University (China). Scott was the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and since 1995 he has edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the central journal in the field of ecocriticism. Scott has also written, edited, or co-edited fifteen books, including Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility.

George Smith
George is one of the founders of Smith, Watson & Company, LLP. Prior to forming Smith Watson & Company, Mr. Smith had a private accounting practice that he started in 1962 in Berkshire County. He has served as Chairman of the Board of Fairview Hospital, Chairman of the Board of Berkshire Health Systems, and has been a member and past President of the Southern Berkshire Volunteer Ambulance Squad for 44 years. He currently serves on the Board of the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, and is currently a trustee of the Mass College of Liberal Arts Endowment foundation. In his free time Mr. Smith enjoys racing his vintage racecar, a 1948 MG TC at Lime Rock Park and Watkins Glen.

Mitchell Thomashow
Dr. Mitchell Thomashow is the Director of the Second Nature Presidential Fellows Program. He devotes his life and work to promoting ecological awareness, sustainable living, creative learning, improvisational thinking, social networking, and organizational excellence. He is engaged in teaching, writing, and executive consulting, cultivating opportunities and exchanges that transform how people engage with sustainability and ecological learning. From 2006-2011 he was the president of Unity College in Maine. Previously he was the Chair of the Environmental Studies program at Antioch University New England. He is the author of Ecological Identity and Bringing the Biosphere Home, and is currently working on a new book, The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Culture.