Lisa Bloom, Attorney at Law | Jean Houston, Author/Lecturer | Marilyn Rainwater, Political Candidate
Sara Jane Rose, Founder of Sally’s List | Charlene Spretnak, Author/Lecturer | Marianne Williamson, Author/Lecturer
Adam Winkler, Professor of Law | Womens Campaign School at Yale University
Charlene Spretnak – Author/Lecturer
Charlene Spretnak is a feminist and ecological activist and author. She is particularly interested in recent discoveries – in physiology and health, but also in all fields – that prove that physical reality, including humans, is far more dynamically interrelated than we had supposed even a decade ago. These new discoveries are the subject of her book Relational Reality. She will speak about research findings indicating that women tend to perceive the interrelatedness, or the gestalt, of a situation much more than do men; this is a skill that is badly needed in public office! In 1983 she traveled to Germany to interview 62 members of the Green Party for her book Green Politics (1984; principle coauthor), which was a catalyst for the founding, six months after its publication, of the Green Party movement in the United States, of which she was a main co-founder. She was friends with the late Petra Kelly, a leader of the German Green Party, and is friends with Sara Parkin, a one-time leader of the UK Green Party and a member of the UK Sustainability Commission, so has had ample opportunity to observe women campaigning and governing to achieve positive change.
[pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]Women’s tendency to perceive the interrelatedness of any situation is a skill badly needed in government.[/pullquote]
She has also written several books that proposed a “map of the terrain” of various emergent social movements and helped to create an eco-social analysis and vision for Green politics, ecofeminism, and ecologically engaged spirituality. In 1989 she was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame for her writings on social-change activism and spirituality. In 2006 she was named by the British government’s Environment Department as one of the “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time.” In 2012 Charlene Spretnak received the Demeter Award for lifetime achievement as “one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time” from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She hosts a weekly radio program, “All Together Now,” on the Progressive Radio Network (prn.fm).
In addition to many articles, op-ed pieces, and reviews, Charlene Spretnak has written the following books: Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World (2011); Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her ReEmergence in the Modern Church (2004); The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (1997); States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991); The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics (1986); Green Politics: The Global Promise (principle coauthor, 1984); and Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (1978). In addition, she edited an anthology, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement (1982).
