Kinship Fellows

Following our Fellows: Leadership in Action.

2008 Fellow Josh Donlan Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

April 14, 2010 • New York, New York • Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its eighty-sixth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of some 3,000 applicants.

The projects supported by this year's Fellowships are as varied as the Fellows themselves. For example, Gauvin Alexander Bailey will be studying Rococo art and spirituality in South America, while Adam Begley will be writing a biography of John Updike; C. Josh Donlan will be applying his conservation knowledge to building an environmental social network; and Judith S. Eisen will continue her investigation of the role of resident microbes in nervous system development and function. Petr Janata will be further developing his investigation of what music-evoked autobiographical memories can tell us about the functional organization of the brain; and Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard will be conducting a comparative study of nature-culture relations. Read more »

2005 Fellows Nigel Asquith and Maria Teresa Vargas Awarded Prize

March 19, 2010 • Santa Cruz, Bolivia • A Fundacion Natura Bolivia project to maintain drinking and irrigation water supplies and to conserve upper watershed forests in the Santa Cruz valleys in Bolivia has won Swiss Re's International ReSource Award 2010. The project will capitalise five municipal water funds and will at the same time help to improve livelihoods in the region. Read more »

2009 Kinship Fellow Sean McGuire Makes An Impact

February 3, 2010 • Annapolis, MD • Governor Martin O'Malley today launched the Maryland Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an innovative online tool that will allow policymakers and citizens to more accurately measure the State's standard of living by including indicators of social and environmental health along with traditional economic calculations.

"The pure economic activity stemming from the explosive growth of urban sprawl positively contributes to the GSP," explained project leader Sean McGuire of DNR's Office for a Sustainable Future. "Yet, along with sprawl come increased commuting time, increased traffic congestion, land use conversion, and automobile impacts. And those negative impacts are not included in current economic gauges. In short, just because money is exchanging hands within an economy does not necessarily mean that citizens are enjoying sustainable prosperity." Read more »

2008 Kinship Fellow Elisabeth Fahrni Mansur Publishes Living with Tides and Tigers: The Sundarbans Mangrove Forest

November 10, 2009 • This stunning collection of photographs documents the wildlife, various ecological aspects and the people of this unique jungle. Interspersed with personal accounts about the authors' experiences over the past nearly twenty years and the insightful background information, this attractive coffee-table book aims to increase awareness about this fragile ecosystem. By Gertrud and Helmut Denzau, Elisabeth Fahrni Mansur and Rubaiyat Mansur Mowgli. Read more »

2005 Kinship Fellow James G. Workman publishes Heart of Dryness

August 4, 2009 • This nonfiction narrative set in the Kalahari dramatizes the timeless struggle over water, the fulcrum of political power. Facing drought, scarcity and climate change the besieged indigenous Bushmen use voluntary survival strategies while Botswana's government enforces regulatory rule. Their rivalry foreshadows our world, where two in three thirsty humans will soon endure shortages, resource conflict, a $900 billion market, and a global fight for water as a human right. Read more »

2008 Kinship Fellow M.D. Madhusudan Wins 2009 Whitley Award

May 13, 2009 • London, UK • HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) tonight presented one of the world's top prizes for grassroots nature conservation, a Whitley Award, to M.D. "Madhu" Madhusudan of India, for his work to balance the needs of people and wildlife, including elephant and tigers, in the world's most densely-populated biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats.
Dr Madhusudan, the director of the Mysore-based Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), received his honour during a ceremony held at the Royal Geographical Society, London, and hosted by The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) , the UK-based charity which administers the international awards programme.

The prize includes a Whitley Award project grant of 30,000 British pounds - donated by HSBC Private Bank - an engraved trophy, membership of an influential network of Whitley Award winners and opportunities to apply for WFN Continuation Funding. Read more »

"From land protection to fisheries management, resource managers and conservationists face a wide range of challenges. The Kinship program offers innovative ideas and compelling approaches to help meet some of those challenges. Ideas we explored at Kinship will make me a better resource manager."

- Eric Schwaab, IAFWA, USA, 2003 Fellow