EH Blog

LaUra (she/her), a 2012 Environmental Humanities graduate, is a truth-seeker, community-builder, cultural critic, and grief worker. She is also the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. Inspiration finds her in natural landscapes and honest, open-hearted dialogue. She is the founding director of the Good Grief Network and has been studying and cultivating personal and collective resilience strategies for nearly a decade. She is trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and is a Climate Reality Leadership Corps member & mentor.

Doug Sam is a second-year EH student and a Mellon Community Fellow. The Mellon Community Fellowship in the EH Program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fellows form reciprocal partnerships with a community organization and develop a project that addresses local environmental justice issues. Doug has partnered with the Summit Land Conservancy for his fellowship, merging both his interests in environmental education and Indigenous history. Summit Land Conservancy is a nonprofit dedicated to saving open spaces of Park City and the Wasatch Back.

Join the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program for a presentation from the Mellon Community Fellows on their work to further environmental justice. Doug Sam and Riley Sayers will discuss their local community partnerships and the ways they use humanities tools to further environmental justice. This fellowship and our program's efforts to further environmental justice is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Sam Nelson is currently the Environmental Education Intern with Tree Utah. He is working with local schools to help students learn about plants in their community through creative writing and interdisciplinary, place-based curriculum. As an EH student, Sam seeks to fuse his interests in writing, education, and plant ecology to help children build stronger relationships to land in their communities. He is particularly interested in storytelling from plant perspectives.

Kailey Kornhauser has taken on many roles since graduating from the Environmental Humanities Program in 2017: facilitator, policy analyst, planning commissioner, PhD student, and advocate for body size inclusion in the cycling world. She is currently a PhD candidate in Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. She is interested in collaborative forest governance and public engagement on National Forest Lands in Oregon.