Year of Rewilding

I am Kathleen McNary Wood. Growing up as a feral child in Miami, Florida, and in the absence of traditional familial and cultural programming, I discovered a deep and enduring kinship and love among the trees, birds, and insects in the backyards, streets, and cracks of pavement of my childhood suburban neighborhood. That love compelled me to want to spend my life healing the mortal wounds Western capitalism and culture have inflicted upon the planet and inspired a profession in environmental science.

Attending Florida International University, I obtained a Bachelor of Science (Magna cum Laude) in Environmental Studies, followed by a Master of Liberal Arts in Sustainability and Environmental Management in Extension Studies from Harvard University. For more than 30 years, I have worked as an environmental consultant, with specific expertise in environmental impact assessment and multicriteria evaluation. My work has focused on environmental systems analyses, specializing in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. Over the course of my career, I have designed and conducted more than 50 research projects, classifying and mapping terrestrial, wetland, coastal, and marine habitats, preparing and overseeing comprehensive environmental impact assessments, conducting socio-economic and cultural analyses, designing and facilitating stakeholder meetings and workshops, developing environmental educational programs, advising on environmentally sustainable development, and working in association with private and public sector entities to develop environmental partnerships, legislation, and policy.

In search of solutions for my communities’ ecological ills, I have also held management positions across public, non-profit, and private sectors. I served as the Director of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) Department of Environment and Maritime Affairs, the TCI government agency charged with the management, oversight, and enforcement of the natural resources within 35 protected areas, a marine exclusive economic zone of 91,025 km2, and 430 km2 of upland, coastal, and wetland habitats. I now serve as the Research Director at the Turks and Caicos Reef Fund, TCI’s only non-profit environmental advocacy organization, and as the Principal at SWA Environmental, a Turks and Caicos Islands-based company, specializing in transformative environmental management through cooperative scientific research, environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impact assessment, environmental advocacy, and policy development.

Despite the work I have done, across the course of my career, I have been traumatized by intimate experiences of ecological violence and frustrated by an environmental science orthodoxy that demands detached objectification of the more-than-human world, while utterly failing to reverse the trajectory of global ecological cataclysm. My life experiences now culminate in the pursuit of a PhD in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. My proposed inquiry will employ co-operative action research to work collaboratively and equitably with the beings with whom I share a land base in Asheville, North Carolina to restore a colonized and degraded ecological community and myself to flourishing wildness. By rewilding myself within an ecoregion as a subjective co-researcher, rather than as a detached and objective scientific observer, I hope to radically contest and provide an alternative to the centuries-old assumptions of the dominant scientific paradigm and provide a platform for the suppressed and marginalized voices of the more-than-human world.

I welcome all to join me in this resurrection and rediscovery of wildness.