The Thin Green Line

Learn More About the Speakers

Taylor Brorby is an award-winning essayist, poet and environmentalist. A fellow at the Black Earth Institute, Taylor received his M.A. in Liberal Studies from Hamline University in 2013 and is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. Taylor edited "Fracture: Essays, Poems and Stories on Fracking in America" the anthology of creative writing on fracking (Ice Cube Press, 2016). He is a blogger for The Huffington Post, where he writes on education and environmentalism and he reviews books for The Englewood Review.

Eric de Place is the policy director at Sightline Institute and a researcher, writer, speaker and policy analyst. He spearheads Sightline Institute’s work on energy policy. He is known as a leading expert on coal and oil export plans in the Pacific Northwest and he is considered an authority on a range of issues connected to fossil fuel transport, including carbon emissions, local pollution, transportation system impacts, rail policy and economics. He has researched and published more than 200 articles, reports and analyses on these proposals and his work on fossil fuel transport is cited by regional and national news media outlets hundreds of times each year.

Jana Gastellum is the Program Director of Climate at Oregon Environmental Council where she leads state and regional work to bring about healthy, low-carbon and equitable communities. Her recent work has focused on implementing programs to advance clean fuels, energy efficiency and limiting and pricing carbon pollution. Jana facilitates the Healthy Climate Partnership, a statewide network of representatives from business, public interest, labor, local government and faith communities all dedicated to furthering climate action in Oregon. Jana previously worked on the UN Foundation/Energy Future Coalition climate team where she helped launch the 25x25 renewable energy alliance, a joint initiative with agricultural and forestry leaders.

Patrick Mazza is an independent journalist-researcher-activist focused on climate and global sustainability. On September 2, 2014, Patrick placed himself in the path of a parked oil train at the BNSF Delta rail yard in Everett, Wash., with four other members of Rising Tide Seattle. The five blockaders, known as the Delta 5, then made the case to a jury that bold action is both justified and necessary in the fight against climate change, in light of government and corporate complacency. He serves as a member of 350 Seattle's governing hub and co-facilitator of its Sustainable Solutions Workgroup. He co-founded and served as research director at Climate Solutions. His blog is Cascadia Planet. 

Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher and environmental thought-leader, devoted to an unrelenting defense of the future against those who would pillage and wreck the planet. As a writer, Kathleen is best known for award-winning books of essays that celebrate and explore the meaning of the wet, wild world of rivers, islands and tidal shores. But her growing alarm at the devastation of the natural world led her to focus her writing on the moral urgency of action against climate change and habitat destruction. Quitting her university position, Kathleen began to write in defense of the lovely, reeling world, including in her book "Great Tide Rising: Finding Clarity and Moral Courage to Confront Climate Change."

Ryan Pierce is an artist whose vivid, large-scale paintings depict our world recovering from human industry. He draws on influences from ecological theory, literature and folk art to create scenes that portray the resilience of the natural world. He has exhibited internationally and his work has been recognized by grants from the Joan Mitchell and San Francisco Foundations and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as by reviews in Art in America, Art Papers and The Oregonian. Pierce is the co-founder, with activist Amy Harwood of Signal Fire, a group that facilitates wilderness residencies and retreats for artists of all disciplines. In his “Postcard from Paradise” series, he created postcards as he stopped in every little town from Wyoming to Washington to imagine the impact of Peabody Coal's massive rail export scheme.

Catherine Sampson-Kruse, whose Wallulapum name is Wey-ow'sux, is an enrolled Tribal member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla-WallaWalla-Cayuse, near Pendleton, Oregon. She is a mother of 8 and grandmother of 11 with one great-granddaughter. Cathy is a retired social worker (MSW), whose 30-year service to children and families began on the Umatilla Indian reservation, then to Bethel, Alaska, the Quinault Tribe in Tahola and the Casey Family Program in Yakima, Washington. She served on the Oregon Commission for Women appointed by Gov. Neil Goldschmidt in the 80s. Now you can find her camping with husband, Donn, and family diggin' roots or picking huckleberries in the mountains. And continuing to stand up to help protect the sacred.