worldgarden.net features the photography and writing of Christopher Childs, author of The Spirit’s Terrain: Creativity, Activism, and Transformation, published by Beacon Press in 1998 with a Foreword by the Dalai Lama. Publisher’s Weekly called the book a “spiritual manifesto for modern-day social-environmental activists,” and Bill Moyers praised it as “a very powerful insight that has significance for journalism as well as activism”.
Childs has the unique informal title of Speaker and Campaigner Emeritus for the U.S. branch of Greenpeace, for whom he served as National Speaker and activist between 1987-96; he was one of the earlier speakers crisscrossing the country warning of the risks of climate change. He has since served as Conservation Chair for the Sierra Club’s North Star Chapter, as Chair of the chapter's Clean Air and Renewable Energy Committee, and as an elected member of its Executive Committee. A boardmember and Advocacy Committee Chair of the Minnesota Renewable Energy Society, he helps formulate policy, and works to shape and promote legislation, for both MRES and the Sierra Club.
In 2004, Childs created the Sierra Club's "Walk for Wind," which promoted wind power across Minnesota. With his wife, well-known Minnesota activist and Green Party figure Elizabeth Dickinson, he lives on the West Side of St. Paul in a 1911 house that gets its electricity from a 3-kilowatt solar system; their home has twice been on both the Minneapolis-St. Paul Home Tour and the American Solar Energy Society's national Solar Tour.
Childs was named Lecturer of the Year by the National Association for Campus Activities in 1991 – selected from among finalists who included Maya Angelou – while serving with Greenpeace. He also served the organization as an activist for clean, alternative energy and clean industrial production – and, in the process of demonstrating (peacefully) for those causes, garnered arrests in four states and in the District of Columbia, at the gates of the Bush (41) White House. In recent years, he was named Volunteer of the Year for 2004 by Sierra's North Star Chapter – partly for his work on the "Walk for Wind" – and is the recipient of two additional chapter awards for leadership.
An actor as well as author and activist, his credits extend from several roles on PBS’ American Playhouse to national tours of his own one-man “stage portrait,” Clear Sky, Pure Light: an Evening with Henry David Thoreau – last performed aboard a riverboat on the upper Mississippi as a 2006 benefit for the Sierra Club. He has, however, found very little time for acting since becoming seriously involved in environmental activism in the mid-1980s. He has been communications director for two high-profile Minnesota political campaigns: that of his wife for Mayor of St. Paul in 2005, and the 2002 Green Party gubernatorial campaign of his former Greenpeace colleague Ken Pentel, at a time when the Greens were officially a major party in the state.
Currently, in addition to his nearly full-time volunteer work on energy and global warming and periodic speaking engagements on creativity, on the environment, or on the cause of the Tibetan people – particularly close to his heart since a trip to Tibet, northern Nepal, and Dharamsala, India, at the turn of the millennium (see http://home.igc.org/~worldgarden for Tibet info) – Childs is working on a book about his years with Greenpeace.
Christopher Childs can be reached at worldgarden@igc.org
