Featured Speakers
Marcia Bonta Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books, of which eight are now available, and more than 300 magazine articles. Marcia Bonta was born and raised in the wooded fringes of a suburban South Jersey town, Woodbury, New Jersey. Daughter of Harold and Leona Myers, she inherited her father's love for forests, streams, and swamps. Her earliest memories are of a childhood enchantment with nature.
She went to Bucknell University because she loved the natural beauty of central Pennsylvania. Her college education gave her a broad knowledge of the liberal arts, a B.A. degree, and a husband, Bruce, whose jobs took the family to Washington, D.C., Maine, and, since 1971, back to central Pennsylvania. They raised their three sons on an isolated, forest-covered, mountaintop farm near Tyrone, where, inspired by the works of such authors as Hal Borland, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Rachel Carson, Marcia began a writing career based on her daily explorations of the natural world.
Marcia wrote weekly columns for local newspapers for ten years before changing her career emphasis to books, magazine articles, lecturing, and slide shows on nature and natural history topics. Her work has been reproduced in a number of anthologies, and she has received several awards for her writing. But she treasures most the letters, calls, and conversations with people who have been moved by her writing or her slide shows to appreciate nature more strongly and to join her in trying to protect the natural world.
Gloria Flora In her twenty-two-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, Gloria Flora became nationally known both for her leadership in ecosystem management and for her courageous principled stands. When she was in charge of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in north-central Montana, she made a landmark decision to prohibit natural gas wells along the spectacular 356,000-acre Rocky Mountain Front near the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a place often described as an American Serengeti for its abundant populations of elk, deer, grizzly bears, and fish-filled streams. The oil and gas industry appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but she was ultimately victorious when, on the same day the story of her struggle was being televised nationally on PBS' "NOW with Bill Moyers," the Department of Interior announced a decision reached "at the highest levels" not to approve drilling along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front.
In 2000, she made national headlines again when she resigned as Forest Supervisor for the largest national forest in the lower forty-eight states—the Humboldt-Toiyabe in Nevada and eastern California—to call attention to antigovernment zealots engaged in the harassment and intimidation of Forest Service employees. "Gloria Flora deserves to be held up as an American hero," said Chris Wood, senior policy adviser to then Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck. For her courageous stewardship of public lands, she received the Murie Award from the Wilderness Society, the Environmental Quality Award for exemplary resource decision-making from the Natural Resources Council of America, and the Environmental Hero Award from Sunset Magazine. In 2004, she was selected as one of the nation's top environmentalists by Vanity Fair Magazine.
Today Flora is the director of Sustainable Obtainable Solutions, a nonprofit dedicated to the sustainability of public lands and of the plants, animals, and communities that depend on them. She speaks on ecosystem stewardship, forest and public land sustainability, people's relationships to landscapes—cultural, historical, social, and psychological—and on the critical role of leadership that strives to make a difference.
Alan BergerDue to unavoidable circumstances, Professor Berger has become unable to join the CELA conference this year as a featured speaker.
Alan Berger is associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and is founding director of P-REX, the Harvard Design School Project for Reclamation Excellence. Berger's research and teaching focus on discovering new forms of landscape that result from natural resource extraction, rapid urbanization, and other land-altering industrial processes. His book, Reclaiming the American West (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), received the 2003 Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association and Places magazine (EDRA/Places), and was named a 2003 Colorado Book of the Year by the Library of Congress' Center for the Book. Berger's other books are the award-winning Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (Princeton Architectural Press, June 2006) and Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism on the Pearl River Delta (co-authored with Margaret Crawford, Harvard Design School March 2006). Routledge will publish his next book, entitled Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, in fall 2006.
By using low-angle aerial photography, maps, and other graphic evidence, Berger chronicles waste in the landscape—from abandoned mine pits, mountains of slag, and pools of cyanide, to vacant land, landfills, military installations, and places associated with low-density urbanization. How these sites are valued and considered for adaptive reuse by society is Berger's main area of interest. His work emphasizes the link between our consumption of natural resources and the waste and destruction of landscape to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning our wasteful places for future productive uses. Berger currently serves as a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Office of Land Revitalization, on Brownfield and Superfund site revitalization in the American West.
Berger's work has been published and reviewed in a multidisciplinary array of places, including the New York Times, Dwell, Wallpaper, Cabinet, AA Files, Landscape Journal, Landscape Architecture, Praxis, Landscape Review, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Planning, Public Art Review, Topos, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, and many other publications. He taught landscape architecture at the University of Colorado–Denver from 1999–2001. He has lectured and exhibited work at institutions worldwide.
Berger earned his masters of landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts, where he received its highest awards for design excellence and research. He has been a licensed landscape architect since 1992.
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