|
Scroll down or click an image to read about our organisers and teachers. More bios to follow very soon!
The Clear Sky Grasslands Team
Visiting Teachers
|
Catherine Pawasarat
|
Project creator Catherine Pawasarat has more than 20 years' experience in environmental journalism, and worked as an editorial consultant on sustainability issues for the United Nations University, UNEP-IETC and UN Habitat in Japan. She enjoys working with different people and the challenge of applying universal principles to local situations. She thinks grasslands rock! |
|
|
Michelle Heinz
|
Michelle Heinz has been involved with Clear Sky serving as director of land management in the early days. She now manages operations onsite and is coordinating the Grasslands restoration workshops for 2011. Michelle is passionate about being a part of the vision to inspire a new paradigm shift where grasslands can thrive. |
|
|
Ruth Levin
|
Ruth first discovered the power and beauty of the natural world as a young woman on extended wilderness trips. It brings her tremendous joy to be involved with a project like the Grasslands that is working to channel Clear Sky's vision into a more respectful and sustainable way of relating to the land and community that support us. |
|
|
Zoe Moores
|
Zoe has an educational background in languages and has had a lifelong interest in science and the environment. She has had many opportunities to combine these interests during her travels. Zoe currently works as a primary school teacher in the UK and seeks to share her enthusiasm and interest with the children she teaches.
|
|
|
Clear Sky Grasslands
Team 2010/11
|
Back row: Duncan Cryle, Zoe Moores, Michelle Heinz, Catherine Pawasarat, Linda Hochstetler, Karen McAlliser, Chrispher Lawley
Front row: Ruth Levin, Cara Conroy-Low, Maureen Smith
Not pictured but still appreciated! Edmund Jones, Andy Rogers, David Rogers
We sure learned a lot about grasslands in 2010. We also learned a lot about teamwork, and how many peoples' combined efforts can create something much greater and more wonderful than anticipated.
Above is just the Clear Sky grasslands team; the additional support from our local community both strengthened and inspired our efforts. Our partners, supporters and funders (see separate link below) provided key assistance when and where it really mattered.
It's said that 'people + planet + prosperity = sustainability'. This was a terrific lesson in the power of people to move towards a healthier planet, and a healthier community. (We're working on incorporating the 'prosperity' part - please stay tuned.) Thanks everyone!
|
|
|
|
|
|
Don Gayton
|
"I’ve reached a stage in life where writing is a distinct pleasure, and I use it to indulge a series of personal fascinations. The evolution of landscape painting. The aerodynamic mysteries of the airplane wing. Rural development, the ecology of natural grasslands, the geology of the Great Spokane Flood. And more of that ilk. I call myself a scientist, but really I’m a 'gentleman scientist' because I flunked Algebra.
"For me, science is the undiscovered country of the literary imagination. As a reader, fiction has always been my first love, followed closely by scientific journals. So as a writer, I like to threaten the fortified boundaries of non-fiction, shouting and waving my arms. More and more I gravitate to story as our primal form of communication.
"My childhood was spent in 1950’s southern California, in a new invention called the suburb. My father’s powerful attraction to fishing prompted a move to a tiny coastal community on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, where I spent a couple of glorious years roaming beaches and fields and forests. We then moved to Seattle, where I attended a multi-racial highschool, played football, read Dostoevskii and channeled the beatniks. Hitchhiked around Europe after graduation, and then answered Kennedy’s call, spending a couple of fascinating years in Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer.
"Meanwhile Vietnam loomed larger and larger. I returned to the US in the fall of 1968, to race riots and body counts. The notion that my government would ask me to help peasant farmers in the Peace Corps, and then ask me to kill them in Vietnam, did not sit well. Tumultuous years followed, ending in our move to Canada. We have six children (thank god for socialized medicine!). All of us are proud Canadians, but America still tastes of home waters to me, in spite of the politics.
"I work as an ecologist, specializing in grasslands, grazing management and fire ecology, and I write in my spare time. In the last century, the physicists interpreted science for the public; in this next beleaguered century, we ecologists will get our turn."
Places Don has lived or worked:
- San Pedro, Pasadena and Fullerton, California
- Dungeness, Seattle, Twisp, Tonasket and Omak, Washington
- Las Cruces, New Mexico
- San Felipe de Ocoyotepec, Mexico
- Riosucio (Choco) and Zuluaga (Huila), Colombia
- Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia
- Munich, Germany
- Saskatoon, Regina and Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan
- Nelson, Vancouver and Summerland (our current home), British Columbia
|
|
|
|
|
|
Peter Davidson
|
Peter has worked extensively in the Rocky Mountain Trench, and is the current chair of the Rocky Mountain Trench Natural Resources Society and the Rocky Mountain Naturalists. He’s a trained agrologist and wildlife biologist who also specializes in weed management.
|
|
|
Leslie Lowe
|
Leslie is a landscape designer specializing in native plants, stream bank restoration and master planning. She’s from Marysville, BC and works with Bruce Boody Landscape Architect, where she’s worked on developing native seed mixes and protocols.
|
|
|
