Duluth is a port city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of St. Louis County. Located on Lake Superior in Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, the city is a hub for tourism and cargo shipping. Commodities shipped from the Port of Duluth include coal, iron ore, grain, limestone, cement, salt, wood pulp, steel coil, and wind turbine components. Duluth is south of the Iron Range and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Grand Rapids is a city in Itasca County, Minnesota, United States, and it is the county seat. The population is 11,126 according to the 2020 census. The city is named for the 3.5-mile (5.6 km) long rapids in the Mississippi River which was the uppermost limit of practical steamboat travel during the late 19th century. Today the rapids are hidden below the dam of UPM Paper Company.
Ira Flatow is a radio and television journalist and author who hosts Public Radio International's popular program Science Friday. On TV, he hosted the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Newton's Apple, a television science program for children and their families. Later he hosted another PBS series, Big Ideas. He has published several books, the most recent titled Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature.
Freeman Wilford Patterson, is a Canadian nature photographer and writer born at Long Reach, New Brunswick. He lives at Shamper's Bluff, New Brunswick.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on video taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.
Art Wolfe is an American photographer and conservationist, best known for color images of landscapes, wildlife, and native cultures. His photographs document scenes from every continent and hundreds of locations, and have been noted by environmental advocacy groups for their "stunning" visual impact.
Jim Brandenburg is an environmentalist and nature photographer and filmmaker based near Ely, Minnesota. His career includes over 10 years as a newspaper photojournalist, over 30 years as a contract photographer for the National Geographic Society, and commissions from such groups as the United States Postal Service, NHK and the BBC.
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
Baratunde Rafiq Thurston is an American writer, comedian, and commentator. Thurston co-founded the black political blog Jack and Jill Politics, whose coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention was archived in the Library of Congress, and was director of digital for The Onion. In 2012, his book How to be Black became a New York Times bestseller.
Joel Sartore is an American photographer focusing on conservation photography, speaker, author, teacher, and a long-time contributor to National Geographic magazine. He is the head of The National Geographic Photo Ark project, a 25-year effort to document the approximately 12,000 species living in the world's zoos and wildlife sanctuaries.
Kenneth J. Lamberton is an American writer and former teacher. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Lamberton attended the University of Arizona, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. He was working as a science teacher in Mesa, Arizona in 1985 when he was awarded a Teacher of the Year award. A few months later, the then 28-year-old Lamberton was arrested for child molestation for having an affair with a 14-year-old student and transporting her across state lines. During his twelve-year prison term at the Santa Rita unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex at Tucson, he participated in a creative writing program run by Richard Shelton and became a writer, penning essays for the prison magazine La Roca. After his release on September 25, 2000, he began to publish non-fiction books and articles on natural history and crime and punishment in the Southwest.
Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common is to recall a personal observation or experience while in the outdoors, especially when traveling. Others pursue it particularly as an outdoor lifestyle, to be involved with nature and the elements, some as an escape from the artificial world.
William Albert Allard is an American documentary photographer who worked in color from 1964.
Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..
Part2 Pictures is an American production company that launched in 2007 in Brooklyn, New York. It is known for projects including CNN’s This Is Life with Lisa Ling,Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi for Hulu, the series Belief with Oprah Winfrey for OWN, Discovery Channel’s Dixie Mafia,Engineering Ground Zero for PBS NOVA, and National Geographic Channel’s Hard Time.
Barbara Bosworth is an American artist, educator, and photographer. She works primarily with a large-format, 8x10 view camera and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature. Bosworth's works have been included in magazines, journals, books and permanent collections, and shown in solo exhibits nationally and internationally. In 1985, she won a Guggenheim fellowship for her photographic work.
Corina Newsome is an American ornithologist, birder, science communicator, and graduate student at Georgia Southern University. In response to the racism faced by Black birder Christian Cooper in Central Park, Newsome co-organized Black Birders Week to celebrate Black birders.
Chanell Stone is an American photographer. She is Black and known for her "Natura Negra" series. Stone lives and works in Oakland, California.
Black Birders Week is a week-long series of online events to highlight Black nature enthusiasts and to increase the visibility of Black birders, who face unique challenges and dangers when engaging in outdoor activities. The event was created as a response to the Central Park birdwatching incident and police brutality against Black Americans. The inaugural event ran from May 31 to June 5, 2020. The week of events was organized by a group of STEM professionals and students known as the BlackAFinSTEM collective.
Mamie Parker is an American biologist, conservationist, executive coach, facilitator, and inspirational speaker from Wilmot, Arkansas. She holds a PhD in limnology from the University of Wisconsin and spent 30 years with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in a variety of positions in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Highly regarded as a pioneer in the field, she was the first Black woman to serve as the Assistant Director of Fisheries and Habitat Conservation and the first African American to lead a USFWS regional office when she served as the Northeast Service Regional Director, covering 13 northeastern states. She also served as USFWS Chief of Staff and Chief of Fisheries. She received the US government's highest honor for career service employees for her accomplishments, the Presidential Rank Meritorious Service Award, and in 2005 was the first African American inducted into the Arkansas Outdoor Hall of Fame. Since retiring from USFWS, she has worked as an executive leadership coach, inspirational speaker, and environmental consultant with Ma Parker and Associates and EcoLogix Group, Inc. She is on the board of directors of the National Wildlife Federation, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, The Nature Conservancy-Virginia Chapter, American University School of Public Affairs, Ducks Unlimited, and the Student Conservation Association. Throughout her career she has worked to advance diversity and opportunities for minority students in conservation and fisheries careers; in 2016 she was awarded the Emmeline Moore Prize from the American Fisheries Society for these efforts.
