Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

Kathleen Dean Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University Writer Laureate at Oregon State University, where she teaches environmental ethics and moral reasoning.  Her best-known books are personal narratives about our cultural and spiritual relations to wet, wild places – Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, Holdfast, and The Pine Island Paradox, winners of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, respectively.  A new book of essays, Wild Comfort, will be published next year.  Moore is co-editor of three recent anthologies – How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal.  In addition, Moore is the author of critical thinking textbooks and a book on the Presidential pardoning power, named by Choice magazine as an “outstanding academic book.”  Her work is published and reprinted widely, appearing in such places as Orion, Discover, the New York Times magazine, and Audubon.  Moore is the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State, which has as its mission to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophy, and the emotive power of the written word to re-imagine our relation to the natural world.  She lives with her husband, a biologist, in Corvallis, Oregon.

visit Kathleen Dean Moore's personal website

Michael P. Nelson holds a joint appointment as a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy in the Lyman Briggs College, the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University.  He is the author of many scholarly articles as well as co-author or co-editor of three books in and around the area of environmental philosophy (The Great New Wilderness Debate [1998], The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate [2008], and American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study [2004]).  Nelson is also resident philosopher of the Isle Royale wolf/moose project, the longest continuous study of a predator/prey system in the world.  He is the co-creator and co-director of the Conservation Ethics Group, an environmental ethics and problem solving consultancy group. He currently lives with his three dogs, three cats, and one wife on a chunk of land in rural Bell Oak, Michigan.

visit Michael P. Nelson's personal website