Calling ALL Wilderness Thinkers!

1964 to 2014: Marking the 50th anniversary of the USA’s Wilderness Act, LEAP’s new “Wilderness Thinkers in Residence” is a year-long, online residency project featuring diverse voices and creative works reflecting on Wilderness.

The residency program is actively seeking participants: there is no limit to how many people can participate; “Thinkers” can be from anywhere; and the only requirement is that creative works (essays, poems, songs, stories, drawings, paintings, videos, interviews etc.) relate to Wilderness. All Wilderness Thinkers’ reflections and creations will be archived on the project website and fifty-two people will be chosen as Featured Thinkers in Residence whose works will be highlighted and posted online weekly from September 3, 2014 – September 2, 2015. Register HERE!

The project is inspired by the succinct and poetic definition found in the Wilderness Act:
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Although the “Wilderness Thinkers in Residence” project primarily lives online, it is appropriately rooted in the small Northern New Mexico village of Questa. Flanked by two Wilderness Areas, one Wilderness Study Area and the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, Questa provides an ideal location for a year-long events program, “Thinking Wilderness” and launch pad for the “Thinkers in Residence Project”.

Project co-organizer, Anita McKeown says, “From it’s starting point in the village of Questa, we hope that the ripples of this project spread statewide, nationally and internationally to new participants and audiences reflecting on Wilderness in the 21st Century.”

See www.thinkingwilderness.org for how to become a “Wilderness Thinker in Residence”, email thinkingwilderness@gmail.com or call 575-586-2362.