Karen is a strategist, organizer, teacher, writer and facilitator with more than 25 years experience in making social change. She is the founder of a Climate Hope – a project helping people build personal and community resilience in the climate era. Karen is a former Executive Director of Greenpeace Canada and past International Campaign Director of Stand.earth. Early in her career she led the campaign to protect the rainforest of Clayoquot Sound, now a UN Biosphere Reserve. She was a principle architect of the multi-sector collaboration that led to the protection of the Great Bear Rainforest. Since then she has been working to stop the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, and to develop and implement climate policy, nationally and internationally. She has done extensive organizing with indigenous communities on the front line of climate justice.
Karen has made a lifelong study of how change is made at the individual and collective level. She led the Hollyhock Leadership Institute where she trained several thousand leaders in the theory and practice of social change and now serves on the Board.
Karen has been a lifelong student and teacher focused on the intersection of the inner spiritual realms with the outer planetary and social crises. Steeped in Jungian psychology, Judaic and Christian mysticism, Karen offers frameworks for engaging with the climate crisis in a way that enlivens us and calls into deeper relationship with the world around us. She uses the Work that Reconnects and the 4 paths of Creation Spiritually to guide groups in experiential sessions and retreats. She is an ordained inter-faith minister focused on the emotional adaptation that supports life in the climate era.
She lives on a tiny island off the coast of British Columbia gardening and contemplating the paradoxical possibilities of a climate-driven mass spiritual awakening and apocalyptic social collapse.
Recent Comments