Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation

Fellowship Year: 2010

Academic Background: Yale Divinity School - MA 2011- (Divinity/Religion and Environment)

Steve Blackmer spent the first part of his career working as an organizer and advocate for forest conservation and forest-based community development in New Hampshire and the Northern Forests of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. Over a span of 25 years, Steve held leadership positions with the Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Alliance, Appalachian Mountain Club and Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and served on the board of numerous conservation organizations at the local, state and national levels. He holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College in Anthropology and a Master of Forestry degree from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. Over the past several years, Steve has been seeking a deeper understanding of the worldviews that enable humans to do such harm to the earth (and to each other) and how the environmental movement can tap into the positive transformational power of religious and spiritual traditions. To pursue this, Steve resigned as founding president of the Northern Forest Center, spent a year as a Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest, and is now a Master’s degree student at the Yale Divinity School. He is interested in the role of religion in social change movements, how faith communities can broaden and renew the environmental movement, and how the environmental movement can deepen itself by renewing its own sense of the earth as sacred.

Expertise: Environmental & Public Health