Stephen Blackmer is founding executive director of Kairos Earth and chaplain of Church of the Woods. Steve comes to this with 30 years of conservation experience, having founded and built conservation organizations including the Five Rivers Conservation Trust, Northern Forest Alliance and Northern Forest Center. A midlife shift led him to Yale Divinity School and ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church, carrying the question in his heart and mind: “How can being a priest deepen my work to conserve the Earth? What does the Christian tradition have to offer to this work? How can the Christian tradition be re-understood and re-imagined in a time of need? How can the conservation movement recover its understanding of the Earth as holy ground?”
The Global Institute’s Yale Forest Forum Leadership Seminar Lunch Series is YFF’s weekly gathering, providing opportunities to hear from leaders in forest management, conservation, or policy in an informal setting. The YFF speaker series is the longest continuously running speaker series at F&ES. Speakers come from a wide range of organizations and perspectives, including government, NGOs and businesses, working at scales from local to international.
Unless otherwise noted for individual events (above), lunches typically take place Thursdays at noon, in Marsh Hall, 360 Prospect Street.