Kathleen Dean Moore, award-winning nature writer and environmental activist, will speak at Carleton College on Thursday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. in the Weitz Center for Creativity Room 236. Called a “defender of all that is wet and wild,” she is best known for her award-wining books of essays that celebrate and explore the meaning of the wet, wild world of rivers, islands, and tidal shores.
A naturalist and moral philosopher, her love of nature has led her to a new life of climate writing and activism. Moore will read from and speak about her new book, “Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change.” Copies of the best-selling book will be available for purchase at the event and refreshments will be served.
“Great Tide Rising” (Counterpoint, 2016) asks readers important questions about our relationship to the planet: “Why is it wrong to wreck the world?” and “What is our obligation to the future?” Moore takes on these essential questions with words that are at once heartbreaking and motivating, terrifying and empowering, analytical and lyrical, hopeful and strategic.
She writes, “Even as tides rise against the shores, another great tide is rising - a tide of outrage against the pillage of the planet, a tide of commitment to justice and human rights, a swelling affirmation of moral responsibility to the future of the lovely, reeling planet.”
Kirkus Review reports, “In this probing and lyrical book, Moore reminds readers of the inter-relatedness of all living things through time, and she offers a clarion call to summon the moral courage to 'rage against the dying' of the Earth. An impassioned and well-reasoned cry for 'great rising tides of affirmation of justice and human decency and shared thriving.”
Moore is the author of numerous award-winning environmental books and is a recipient of the Sigurd Olson Nature writing award. Her essays have appeared in High Country News, Orion, Audubon, Utne Reader, Earth Island Journal, New York Magazine, and Conservation Biology.
She holds a PhD from the University of Colorado and is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she taught critical thinking and environmental ethics. She is the co-founder of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, where she now serves as Senior Fellow. She blogs regularly at www.riverwalking.com.
This event is sponsored by the Carleton College Department of Environmental Studies, and made possible with support from the C. Angus Wurtele Environmental and Technology Studies Fund. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4323. The Weitz Center for Creativity is located at Third and College Streets in Northfield.
