Howdy!

I am currently the spring 2008 intern at WiserEarth.org helping with local, Bay Area outreach and events research.

Oringinally from Los Angeles, California, I had always been excited about the diversity of the city, but also disturbed by the widespread inequality. The blatant disparities between students at my High School were eye opening and served as inspiration for pursuing later social justice work. When I left for college in Boston, I became involved with the campus labor organization and helped win a successful wage parity campaign for the facilities staff on campus.

After suffering a bout of disillusionment after the 2004 election, I have gradually been shedding my cynicism with system-based activism. But behind systems, institutions, policies, organizations and families are just people. I feel that we exercise the most influence over our relationships with other people, and this should be our fist step towards a more just world; by placing the larger, rather ominous problems in our world on to the more manageable scale of human relationships. For this reason, I am happy to be the local outreach intern at WiserEarth. Being engaged in the local community is to me the first step in being engaged in a global community.

Although I have a second life as activist, I am a biologist by trade and will be starting my masters in ecology fall 2008 at SFSU with Andy Zink to study the evolution of social behavior in insects. In the past few years I have developed a fancy for ants and the social insects. They represent for me some of the inherent complexity and beauty that is at stake when we talk of the Earth’s declining biodiversity.

I also have a secret love for fungus...see my mushroom field guide.