Board of Directors

Peter P. Blanchard, III
Peter is a founder of Greenwood Gardens, a New Jersey non-profit organization promoting historic garden restoration, horticulture, natural history, and open space preservation. He is a graduate of Princeton University and received an MFA in forestry from Yale University. He currently serves on a number of boards, including the Dendroica Foundation, the Frick Collection, and the Helen Clay Frick Foundation. He has also served on the boards of the Trust for Public Land; The Nature Conservancy (Maine Chapter); The Nature Conservancy (NJ Chapter); and RARE. Peter lives in Manhattan and Somevilles, Maine. Peter is the author of We Were an Island: The Maine Life of Art and Nan Kellam.

Robin Morris Collin
Robin Morris Collin joined the faculty at Willamette University College of Law in fall 2003 as professor of law. She came to Willamette after a distinguished 10-year career as a tenured member of the University of Oregon School of Law faculty. In 1993, she became the first law professor to teach sustainability at an American law school. She received her law degree from Arizona State University College of Law and is a member of the bar in both Oregon and Arizona. She also is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Morris Collin has been awarded the Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore, the David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Judith Ramaley Award from the Oregon Campus Compact for civic engagement in sustainability. Morris Collin serves on the board of her family’s Red River Shipping Company, the first and only African-American owned and operated vessel line.

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.

M.G.H. Gilliam
With a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and a background in music and opera production, Marion went on to earn a L.L.B. and a J.D. at the University of Paris. He worked in New York and London for Schroders, an international investment banking firm, before founding Givens Hall and Associates, an investment banking and management company. He is the president of the Myrin Institute, which is the founding organization of Orion and The Orion Society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Julia Harte Widdowson
Julia raises grass-finished Devon cows in Millbrook, New York. She currently serves on the boards of American Farmland Trust, the Institute for Ecosystem Studies and the International Council of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs.