SUE INCHES

SUE INCHES

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Author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action
Environmental Advocate · Educator · Fmr. Director, Maine Department of Marine Resources
Fmr. Deputy Director, State Planning Office

So to me, the connection is just being outdoors. It really brings energy, to my life and it brings energy to my work. And I think for a lot of people, this is true, that nature is kind of the place where they can regenerate their energy. And if people haven't experienced that, I encourage them to try it, because nature can be very restorative. So, absolutely there's a connection between health, the outdoors, and between environmental issues and creating a healthy, clean environment for future generations.

ERICA BERRY

ERICA BERRY

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Author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

And I think the ways that wolves converse with one another, there's also so much there that really conjures the way that we humans do. And I was trying to piece together: why did we feel so threatened by wolves? In part, I think because there's a sort of uncanny mirror that humans have seen in a wolf. And I'll give an example. Wolf packs will form a diversity of family structures very often. So they will have a nuclear family where you'll have two breeders, but they can also have an extended family where there's sort of aunts and uncles in the pack. Or (these are the biologist's names) they'll call it a step-family if a wolf pack welcomes an outside breeder. A foster family, if they welcome another outsider. And I think the way that a pack is its own ecosystem: if one wolf dies, there's one wolf in this pack that might be the one that teaches how to move through the territory. And if that one wolf dies, the whole pack has a much higher likelihood of disbanding. And so this idea that the interconnectivity between the packs and the individuality of the wolves is so critical. It is so beautiful, and you see that studying these different wolves, they have personalities.

ERLAND COOPER

ERLAND COOPER

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Nature’s Songwriter
Producer · Multi-instrumentalist · Composer of Folded Landscapes

Music has the ability to transport you to a place and create a sort of internal landscape. And we all have life-changing things that happened to us. And I remember I made it as a way to kind of ease a busy mind. And perhaps I was missing home. I still call Orkney home, even though I'm not there every day. I'm a thousand miles away today, and I still call Orkney home. For example, when I hear the voice of the curlew, it transports me back to Orkney with such a jolt. In a heartbeat. And music can do that too. It's very transformative. Visual arts have the ability to do that too. And you could stare at a Rothko painting and cry and not quite know why. It can take days to figure out perhaps certain meanings from it. But music I think is quite instant. It can really do that.