Mesa Residents 1999-2007

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, Bombing Judi Bari: Earth First!, the FBI and the Green Scare.

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
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. Currently he is working on 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.

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 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
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 organizer for unions in which immigrant workers make up a large percentage of the membership. 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), and is currently working on a text of oral histories of US and Mexican workers to accompany his photodocumentary project “Transnational Working Communities”.

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 science, technology, the environment and humanity's relationship with nature. His books include The Octopus and the Orangutan: New Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity, The Parrot's Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity, and The Future in Plain Sight. At the Mesa Refuge, Eugene will work on his new book, Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.

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 Coudhry
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 been involved in protecting public health and the environment for more than 20 years in Oregon, Idaho and Texas. Melissa became involved with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility after her experiences as an employee at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. She founded Heart of Texas News, a newspaper focused on public health and spirituality. At the Mesa Refuge, Melissa plans to complete 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’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