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Dr. Finney seeks to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, and increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action.
| Livestream with Dr. Carolyn Finney |
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Watch the conversation with Dr. Carolyn Finney as she helps Chicago Wilderness define a new vision of conservation that can carry us into the future and involve the participation of all people.
She is a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer. She is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience. Dr. Finney is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing; she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia, and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, she returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a BA and MA in gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal and a PhD, where she was a Fulbright and a Canon National Science Scholar Fellow. Along with public speaking, writing, media engagements, consulting and teaching, she served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board for eight years. Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014. Recent publications include Self-Evident: Reflections on the Invisibility of Black Bodies in Environmental Histories (BESIDE Magazine, Montreal Spring 2020), and The Perils of Being Black in Public: We are all Christian Cooper and George Floyd (The Guardian, June 3rd 2020). She is currently working on a performance piece about John Muir (The N Word: Nature Revisited) and is the new columnist at the Earth Island Journal while doing a two-year residency in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College as the Environmental Studies Professor of Practice. Dr. Finney will speak, followed by a conversation with Dr. Kristen Voorhies of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, with time allocated for questions and answers. Dr. Kristen Voorhies grew up in Columbia, MD and fell in love with the waters and the outdoors while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay with her family. That love became a passion that led her to pursue a career focused on the environment. After studying biology and marine sciences at Duke University, she earned her PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago. Along the path to her education she traveled extensively and quickly learned that she would often be the only person of color in the marine science space. Furthermore, she learned that her presence would always create an opportunity for education around diversity and that she enjoyed connecting with people on a human level to grow and talk about issues of diversity and inclusion. Dr. Voorhies was the first black woman to earn her PhD from her department at the University of Chicago. She now works as a lead researcher of endangered species at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Chicago, IL. "In the case of race and the environment, it’s not just who we imagine has something valuable to say. These assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions can be found in the very foundation of our environmental thinking, how we define the environment and how we think of ourselves in relationship with the environment. Who do we see, what do we see?" — From Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors We appreciate our sponsors Your support allowed us to bring this important conversation to the entire Chicago Wilderness community.
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