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About the AuthorSince her galvanic Mills College commencement address in 1969, Stephanie Mills has been speaking, editing, writing, and organizing for ecology and social change. She has produced seven books, including Epicurean Simplicity,Tough Little Beauties, and the recently released On Gandhi’s Path: Bob Swann’s Work for Peace and Community Economics. A longtime bioregionalist and veteran of the Whole Earth publications, Stephanie Mills has written scores of essays and articles appearing in publications from Orion to The Britannica Book of the Year, as well as in numerous anthologies. Active in her community, Mills helped launch a local currency in northwest Lower Michigan, where she has lived since 1984. Featured in the PBS documentary EarthDays, Stephanie Mills holds an honorary doctorate from her alma mater and is a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.
Praise for the AuthorTerry Tempest Williams writes:
"Stephanie Mills is a woman I listen to with great respect. Her life is her art. Her words are a courageous offering of love gleaned through a personal commitment toward social change. Epicurean Simplicity is a smart, soulful, evocative discussion on how we might live lives of greater intention. She invites us into her world of sensory pleasures where the delight of finding freedom in a conscious simplicity is not the gimmick of glossy magazines but a serious reformation of our privileged lifestyles as Americans. Stephanie Mills continues to be a revolutionary of grace and substance, honoring the marriage between landscape and culture." --Advance praise for Epicurean Simplicity (Island Press/Shearwater Books 2002) "I can remember, as a high school dropout in l969," writes Gary Nabhan, "picking up a news story about a Mills College commencement address in which a young woman proclaimed the future to be a cruel hoax, with overpopulation ensuring the doom of our species and others. The 'shocking' quote from that address, and the one which the media and the environmental movement immediately picked up was that the speaker had been 'terribly saddened that the most humane thing for me to do would be to have no children at all.' "That sort of forthrightness catapulted Stephanie Mills into the environmental arena in the days when Paul Ehrlich, David Brower, Gaylord Nelson, Norman Cousins, and Stewart Udall were among its senior spokespersons. Talk shows and lecture circuits made space for a woman who spoke from the heart, unabashedly, about a variety of 'Earth Day' issues. But conviction and courage were not all that Stephanie Mills had, nor did the passing of the first Earth Day slow her down. Over the following years, her other talents and skills became evident; writing, editing and 'divining' the paradigms that would emerge as wellsprings critical to further growth in the environmental movement. Mills excelled as an editor and writer for the ill-fated Rolling Stone offshoot EarthTimes, Not Man Apart, and for Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. "Much of her involvement in the emerging environmental movement is recounted in her fine book Whatever Happened to Ecology?, part of the Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library. Particularly moving are the passages about her decision to root herself in rural Michigan and to focus her energies on the Great Lakes bioregion. This change was not a simple romantic leap 'back to the land'. It turned out to be a painful transition; as priorities shifted human relationships altered and old assumptions became obsolete. Mills also began to devote her intellectual attention to the bioregional movement, ecofeminism and restoration ecology." (Preface to "Becoming a Familiar of the Land," an interview with Stephanie Mills in the September-October 1990 issue of The Bloomsbury Review.) |
Author, teacher, bioregionalistFrom her beginnings, in 1969 as a young ecology activist through editorships, lectures, and authorship of scores of articles, essays and several books, Stephanie Mills has been applying mind and heart in an effort to inspire a renewed stirring of love for the Earth. |