Global LifeScience Ambassadors

I spent ten years heavily involved in environmental politics through Sierra Club, at one time known as "the creek lady" of the San Francisco Bay Area, but also chaired and/or was active on: water issues, transportation issues, urban design, endangered native plants, and more. I resigned to attend to some personal issues, and after every county in the Bay Area had legal protection of riparian systems, and others were taking my place in protecting and restoring individual creek systems, and the steelhead trout were starting to return.

I intended to go back to volunteering after a short break, mainly for the International Rivers Organization in Berkeley, but they are so successful (bravo!) that I decided to put my efforts elsewhere. I like to work on things that have fallen through the cracks. I am also very interested in dark sky preservation.

I am especially signing up here because I am looking to settle on a piece of misused land and restore it. I would love it if that were in Europe, but will settle for the west coast of the United States. I would love to settle on a wildlife corridor to keep it open, or near protected lands that could use being extended (i.e. managed by Nature Conservancy or similar). I prefer meadow or prairie environments.

I am training in permaculture, but have much of that background already, having been an avid reader of Whole Earth Review during its existence, where I became familiar with "Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture", "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" (Weston Price), "Overdeveloped Nations" (Leopold Kohr), "Promise of the Coming Dark Age" (L.S. Stavrianos), and of course, "Small Is Beautiful" (E. F. Schumacher). I am also a big fan of the work done at Solviva, and of Masanobu Fukuoka"s One Straw Revolution". I just visited the Earthships being built near Taos, New Mexico, and am very enthusiastic about that, as well as the straw-bale / cob / bamboo / healthy building materials movement.

My skills are: web design (front end, but can work with pages designed in ASP, Cold Fusion, or SQL;  skilled with Flash, a Photoshop master, and comfortable in UNIX); writing (author of two books: "Childbirth Wisdom from the World's Oldest Societies", and "Strawberries in November: A Guide to Gardening in the East Bay;" also numerous articles for local newspapers and magazines, and a few for Whole Earth Review); evidently highly-skillful at chairing committees, but I will no longer do that for groups I don't care for intensely; could easily tutor in computer use, especially Mac, but PC if necessary (have been told I'm a great teacher after teaching numerous gardening classes for Ecology Center, etc); ability to set up welcoming interior design.

My strongest affiliation is for the crossover between environmentalism/ecology and pagan/goddess/traditional spiritualities, i.e. as taught by Starhawk.

Please say hello if you think you see a connection.