As an environmental ethicist and creative writer, Moore speaks about our cultural and spiritual connections to the Earth and the obligations of respect and responsibility that grow from those relations. She speaks to college students, scientists, writing groups, church assemblies, and many organizations of activists and land advocates.
“I loved listening to Kathy Moore talk to us. She was incredibly moving. . . . She really inspired me to think of the earth in a deeper way. . . . I want to be a leader like that.” --college student
“Although it has been a few weeks, I cannot stop thinking about your words – how eloquently you put them together to make sense out of many of my own jumbled notions. I have not attended a lecture that resonated so with me in some time. . . . It was an enlightening and moving evening, and I just wanted to let you know that you touched someone.” – community arts leader
As a moral philosopher who writes personal essays about our cultural, ethical, and spiritual relation to the land, Moore is often called upon to speak to audiences of conservationists, ecologists, climate activists, writers or philosophers, religious groups, and others. To arrange a talk, please contact Carol Mason,
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. Here are some of the most often requested talks:
Moral Ground: What Do We Owe the Future? Climate change is a scientific and technological issue. But it is primarily a moral issue. Considerations of justice, compassion, and integrity call us to honor our obligations to the future to leave a world rich in possibilities. How can we think clearly about our moral obligations? How can we discuss these hard issues across differences? How can we respond to the crises in ways that are worthy of us as moral beings?
Wild Comfort. “Those who dwell among the mysteries and beauties of nature are never alone or weary of life,” Rachel Carson wrote, and I believe this is true. Even in times of bewildering loss, there is solace that comes from connection to the natural world, and from that intimate connection arise hope and courage, healing and gratitude. “The Earth holds every possibility inside it,” I believe, “and the mystery of transformation, one thing to another. This is the wildest comfort.”
An Environmental Ethic of Care. "All ethics so far evolved," Aldo Leopold wrote, "rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts." This web of emotional and biological relationships calls for acts of commitment. Right ways of acting are those that nurture, enhance, and celebrate healthy webs of connection among all the members of the biotic community. "Sing our love for and obligation to the land," Leopold advised, and it's important to notice how quickly obligation follows on the heels of love.
The Work of a Writer in a World of Wounds. Is it enough for a nature writer to celebrate frog song – even as marshes disappear? Can we praise meadowlarks in the morning – even as suburbs replace their open meadows? What is a writer’s duty toward what Robinson Jeffers called “the heartbreaking beauty that will remain when there’s no heart to break for it?” Many nature writers have given up literary writing and turned instead to activism – community organizing, direct action, polemic journalism. But is nature writing itself a kind of activism? If so, what are our gifts, and what are our responsibilities?
The Second Premise: Our Obligation to the Future. When scientists told the world of the harms threatened by global climate change, they provided the first premise of an important argument. But scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do or convince people to fulfill those obligations – as the scientists discovered to their intense frustration. The missing premise of the argument is outside of scientific purview, in the world of social and ethical values. We need to provide the important second premise: we have an obligation to leave to the future a world at least as rich in possibilities as the world that was left to us. From the combination of scientific facts and moral convictions, but from neither alone, a conclusion follows clearly and powerfully: we have an affirmative moral duty to take immediate steps to prevent or reduce the effects of climate change.
The Secular Sacred. I don’t believe in God. I don't practice a religion. But I believe that the natural world -- the world we prod and pollute and irradiate and pave -- is sacred. This claim has profound moral consequences. It closes the distance between what is and what ought to be. If this is the way the world is -- mysterious, beautiful, contingent, wonderful -- then this is how I ought to act in the world -- with gratitude, with caring, with joy, and with a profound sense of responsibility for its thriving.
The Moral Significance of Wonder
Somewhere, A River is Singing
The Roots are Burning: Toward a Culture of Place and Civic Engagement
The Moral Necessity of Ecological Restoration
Moore teaches writing workshops in beautiful places, from the Apostle Islands to Homer, Alaska. Here are descriptions of some of the workshops:
The Nature Essay: Practicing the Osprey’s Art. Here is how an osprey hunts: soaring over water, patiently watching. All she sees are surfaces, reflections on the riffles, the glistening pines. Then the angle of light changes, or the direction of the wind, and the osprey catches a glimpse of a shadow under the surface of the water. She tucks her wings and dives. So it is with the nature essay. A nature essay begins with patient, loving, informed observation of a particular location. Then it pursues a truth briefly revealed in that place. In this workshop, we will practice diving, the art of moving between experience and an exploration of its meaning.
The Writer in a World Gone Wrong. In a world of war and ecosystem collapse, many writers are reluctantly putting aside their novels or essays to write instead in the unfamiliar form of the political manifesto – Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, David James Duncan, and many others. I’ve found myself in the same uncomfortable place, wanting to write about birdsong, but writing instead about birds with their wings on fire. How can a writer negotiate the competing demands of art and activism, hope and despair? What are the obligations of a writer in a world gone wrong?
Nature and Spirit: A Writing Workshop. Join Kathleen Dean Moore for a day-long writing workshop set amidst the quiet and beauty of the Oregon Coast Range. This is an intense workshop for experienced and aspiring writers who take inspiration from the natural world. Kathleen has planned a full day of writing and walking, reading and listening, with special attention to the sense of wonder that connects nature and spirit.
To Build a Fire. It is often said that what a writer needs most is time alone to think, to write, to agonize – the solitary writer walking snowy streets alone. Don’t believe it for a minute. Frank and I lived by ourselves in an isolated Northwoods cabin some time ago –- an experiment in the writing life. I learned to build a fire in a cookstove and revise text with my mittens on. But most important, I learned that I can no more write in isolation than build a fire with one log. A fire needs bundles of kindling and at least two logs to hold the heat, which is a lesson for any writer. In this workshop, we explore and practice some of the ways that friends and colleagues can provide the spark and reflection a writer desperately needs, informally and in organized writing groups..
“. . . just pay attention, then patch a few words together. . .” Mary Oliver's wonderful poem offers good advice for a writer and good advice for a teacher. In this workshop, we’ll explore how we can use quick, informal writing exercises to bring students into closer awareness of the natural world. Then, how can we design writing experiences that transform that awareness into gratitude and caring?
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