Speakers
The 2024 Maclean Festival invites authors to explore our central theme
Finding Our Place in Nature: The Power of Story
Bill McKibben
Author of The End of Nature
Bill McKibben is an environmental author whose 1989 book, The End of Nature, is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent for climate action. Most recently, he is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice.
McKibben will introduce the theme of the festival: Finding Our Place in Nature: The Power of Story.
Marcelo Gleiser
Author of The Dawn of a Mindful Universe
Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College whose new book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, is an urgent call for a new Enlightenment and the recognition of the preciousness of life using reason and curiosity — the foundations of science — to study, nurture, and ultimately preserve humanity as we face the existential crisis of climate change. His work is a a passionate appeal for “biocentric values that reflect our spiritual re-connection with the Earth.”
Gleiser will ask festival goers to embrace a new life-centric perspective, one which recognizes just how rare and precious life is and why it should be our mission to preserve and nurture it.
Rosalyn LaPier
Author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet
Rosalyn LaPier is an award-winning indigenous writer and ethnobotanist who works within indigenous communities to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), address the growing climate crisis and promote environmental justice. LaPier is currently a professor at University of Illinois and appears in the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary, The American Buffalo.
Lapier will address the overwhelming need for a renewed respect for and application of indigenous knowledge to restore the natural world.
The Youth Plaintiffs of Held vs. State of Montana
The Festival will highlight some of the 16 young plaintiffs who in August 2023, won the historical climate change case, Held v. State of Montana, declaring that the state of Montana violated the youth’s constitutional rights, which are all predicated on their right to a clean and healthful environment. The court invalidated as unconstitutional and enjoined Montana laws that promoted fossil fuels and required turning a blind eye to climate change.
They will describe how their campaign is continuing to bring justice to the natural world.
Liz Carlisle
Author of Healing Grounds: Climate Justice and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Agriculture
Liz Carlisle is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in her home state. She has written three books about regenerative farming and agroecology.
Liz Carlisle will describe a powerful regenerative movement happening in farming today. Carlisle is joined by Latrice Tatsey and Nikiko Masumoto, who are profiled in Healing Grounds.
Latrice Tatsey
Latrice Tatsey serves as Soils Scientist, Cultural Science Lead, and Intern Supervisor for the regenerative grazing initiative at Piikani Lodge Health Institute on the Blackfeet Nation. She was raised on her family’s ranch on Badger Creek, Blackfeet Nation, and her family raises beef cattle. Latrice relies on the knowledge taught by her father, uncles, and grandmother about the traditional/historical uses of their land. She also holds a master’s degree from the department of Land Resources and Environmental Science at Montana State University, where her research partnered with local beef cattle producers and the Blackfeet Nation bison herd to further understanding of how cattle and bison influence soil health.
Nikiko Masumoto
Nikiko Masumoto (she/her) is an organic farmer, memory keeper, and artist. She is Yonsei, a fourth generation Japanese American, and gets to touch the same soil her great-grandparents worked in California where Masumoto Family Farm grows organic nectarines, apricots, peaches and grapes for raisins. Her most cherished value is courage and most important practice is listening.
John Potter and Lauren Monroe, Jr.
Artist John Potter was raised on and off the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin where he grew up with an abiding love for the Natural World. Of his work, Potter says, “When I step outside to paint, my intent is to observe and to borrow from Nature, in order to orchestrate a moment of light, color, and my own emotional and intellectual responses to these on canvas.” Potter's recent painting of the release of a small herd of around 40 bison into their Blackfeet homeland in July, 2023 will be the signature image of the Festival.
Lauren Monroe Jr. is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe located in Montana. His art reflects Blackfeet cultural motifs and imagery as well as his experience of living and growing up on the reservation. His photo of the July 2023 bison release inspired John Potter's painting.
Blackfeet painter Lauren Monroe Jr. will partner with John Potter to recall how historic moments of wildlife restoration has impacted their work.