CONNIE BARLOW (born in 1952, Detroit MI) is a leading advocate for the "assisted migration" of native trees poleward in this time of rapid climate change. Beginning in 2004 in a paper cowritten with Pleistocene ecologist Paul S. Martin titled, "Bring Torreya taxifolia North — Now", Barlow's advocacy subsequently expanded to include even common native trees of North America. (See her assisted migration video playlists.)
Despite the popular appeal of Coast Redwood and Joshua Tree, Barlow's notoriety in forestry and conservation biology is not her advocacy for assisted migration of these species but rather her founding of Torreya Guardians and her ongoing guidance and documentation of citizen volunteers who are planting an endangered tree (a glacial relict) hundreds of miles north of its native range in Florida. The project is controversial not only for being citizen led. Because Florida Torreya is listed as endangered, the group utilized a loophole in the Endangered Species Act that enabled them to legally step out ahead of the scientists in charge of "preventing species extinction." Torreya Guardians access horticulturally produced seeds and cuttings (rather than wild stock) for their northward plantings.
The group's efforts have been showcased in popular magazines, notably Orion and Audubon, and mentioned in science journals (including Nature and Science). National media (e.g., New York Times and The Economist) have also reported on this group's role in putting into practice assisted migration. See the webpage "History of Torreya Guardians", which includes excerpts from print media and science journals that refer to Torreya Guardians and its actions.
During the 1990s, Barlow earned her living as a freelance science writer (four books) and science editor (with Columbia University Press). Her final book, The Ghosts of Evolution (Basic Books, 2001), featured the work of Paul S. Martin and Daniel Janzen in setting forth in 1982 a new paradigm of "evolutionary anachronisms", along with Barlow's own adventures in utilizing her natural history skills to recognize probable anachronistic features of plants in America that had lost to extinction their co-evolved animal seed dispersers. (Florida Torreya's anachronistic seed possibilities were included in this book.) Her previous books, Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science (Copernicus Books), Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life (MIT Press), and From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences (MIT Press), all explore topics within the evolutionary and ecological sciences.
In the 1990s Barlow also contributed articles to Wild Earth magazine toward encouraging others in conservation to develop "deep-time eyes" by way of learning the history of evolutionary change and paleoecological interactions. In 2014, she launched her videoblog series promoting forestry-climate activism, "Climate, Trees, and Legacy". In 2021 she developed a strong appreciation of Indigenous ecological values, and began using the phrase "helping forests walk".
From 2002 through 2020, Barlow (with her husband, Michael Dowd) led an itinerant lifestyle, promoting a sacred and naturalistic view of the "Epic of Evolution". Within Unitarian Universalism, Barlow became a well-known developer of curricula for children's religious education that highlight our shared evolutionary story. Barlow's work was twice featured as the cover story of the Unitarian Universalist national magazine, UU World, (2006 and 1997). Barlow and Dowd are both on the advisory board of the Religious Naturalist Association (created in 2014) and were awarded Religious Humanists of the Year in 2016. (One outcome of visiting and speaking to many UU congregations is Connie's online UU Best Practices webpage, which inventories the diversity of fruitful ways of handling each of the standard components within UU worship services that she has encountered during visits to hundreds of UU congregations.)
Connie is inspired by the philosophy and poetic writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote:
"If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the law of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing." (Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 173).
BOOK: Zach St. George in his
The Journeys of Trees, presents Connie as one of the main characters in this popular science book, as each comes to grips with the need for native trees to geographically track the too-rapid speed of climate change.
This 75-minute conversation between CONNIE BARLOW and TERRY PATTEN was recorded and published October 2020 in AUDIO format on Terry's "State of Emergence" podcast series. The previous week, Terry had posted his conversation with Connie's husband, Michael Dowd — well known as the founder of the "postdoom" concept and community.
The shared projects of Connie and Michael are major elements of this conversation, and all three were great friends. Terry's style of probing for deep insights and personal story revealed how worldviews and values arise and shift, so this is the only video online that entails substantial elements of Connie's own trajectory.
Terry Patten died one year after this podcast episode (October 2021). Michael Dowd died three years later (October 2023). Two month's after Michael's death, Connie was inspired to use her editing skills to shorten the audio and then add image/text overlays to post on youtube. Having spent 19 years on-the-road as an evolutionary educator with Reverend Dowd, and then settling in Michigan at the onset of covid, Connie had acquired an enormous stock of artistic photos and videos of NATURE. Thus, all video fragments and almost all images were filmed by Connie. She posted this video Christmas Day 2023 as a tribute to both her deceased husband and her dear friend.
• EXCERPTED as: "The Way of Science and the Epic of Evolution", UU World, 1998, published as the cover story for the Unitarian Universalists magazine (Nov/Dec). PDF
• EXCERPTED as: "The Way of Science", The Humanist, 1998. PDF
This book is the subject of a paper by Jon Turney in Science as Culture journal in 2001.
"... Bringing the work of ecologists Daniel Janzen and Paul Martin to a wider readership, Barlow is a science popularizer. But she is so thoroughly immersed in the material that the line between scientist and science writer is blurred. This is a good thing. Barlow infects us with her scientific
enthusiasm at first hand...."
"... Like the works of Stephen Jay Gould and Lewis Thomas, this account is emminently accessible for lay readers but also contains enough detail to satisfy those with some knowledge of the subject."
"Ghosts of Evolution, by Connie Barlow, is one of those books that crosses the boundary between simple pleasure reading and scientific information. It is reminiscent of some of the best works of the late Stephen Jay Gould and is easily and enjoyably acessible to both the scientist and non scientist alike...."
THE GHOSTS OF EVOLUTION has been increasingly quoted in the popular press, especially the sections on avocado and honey locust, as evidenced in in these publications:
PDF of chapter by Connie Barlow in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, 2009, MIT Press.
A contributed essay to the 2004 volume, Forest Canopies, edited by Bruce Rinker and Meg Lowman. Based on Connie's 2001 book, The Ghosts of Evolution. Full text.
• "What is Native to the Land?", 2003
Cover story for the Fall 2003 issue of, Earth Matters, newsletter of the Northwest Earth Institute.
• "Let There Be Sight! A Celebration of Convergence in Evolution", 2003
Annotated list of a wealth of examples in which evolution has brought forth the same form or function in life on multiple occasions and in distinct lineages. Full text.
• "Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them", 2001
Based on Connie's 2001 book, The Ghosts of Evolution (Basic Books),
this 8-page article (with color illustrations) in Arnoldia 61(2): 14-21, examines the evidence that some fruits native to North America are ecologically out of step with time
— that is, they co-evolved to attract seed dispersers who went some 13,000
years ago (notably, mastodons and mammoths).
ABOVE LEFT: "Open Systems Living in a Closed Biosphere: A New Paradox for the Gaia Debate" (with Tyler Volk), 1990, BioSystems 23(4):371-84. Abstract and FULL TEXT of paper in PDF.
ABOVE RIGHT: Editor's acceptance letter, by Lynn Margulis, and pre-publication correspondence with James Lovelock.
Educational VIDEO series to document the citizen science/naturalist projects of the all-volunteer Torreya Guardians in human-assisted migration northward of America's most endangered conifer tree, Florida Torreya (Torreya taxifolia), during this time of rapid climate change.
Three Videos on the HISTORY of our Volunteer Effort
This 22-page "comment" provided information and suggested actions for the Florida Torreya recovery plan then being updated.
Barlow's cover letter to this comment included:
"I, Connie Barlow, founded the citizen group Torreya Guardians in 2005, and I have been its webmaster and chief networker ever since. We have no formal organization, so I write here as an individual. I draw upon two decades of experience in what we have learned about best practices for assisting the northward migration of an ESA listed endangered tree: Florida Torreya. Learn about Torreya taxifolia Natural History on our website. Torreya Guardians is the first group credited with implementing the long-distance "assisted migration" of a climate-endangered plant."
EXCERPT: "My primary suggestion entails the need for "assisted range expansion" of dominant canopy trees. On a practical basis, this should be prioritized wherever replanting seeds or seedlings becomes a necessity in a national forest, owing to logging, canopy fires, or climate-induced deaths of vast acreages of trees, especially when it is clear that climate change is the root cause of stress in trees that are then killed secondarily by native insect pests or pathogens...."
Connie Barlow expanded her photo-rich, lengthy webpage Growth Capacities of COAST REDWOOD expressly to help guide nursery and planting best practices of Coast Redwood assisted migration efforts into coastal Pacific Northwest by a new citizen group based in Seattle, Propagation Nation.
• 2022: Comment on Endangered Species Act proposed rule change for climate adaptation
Comment time for this proposed regulation ended August 8, with a total of 553 comments — including the COMMENT I POSTED, drawing upon my experience with Torreya Guardians.
I attached a 5-page pdf that, after voicing a YES to the proposal, offered RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION:
1. Create implementation frameworks and policies that are distinct for plants.
2. Encourage nongovernmental entities to use the ESA "exception" for plants.
3. Follow the lead of the USDA Forest Service [in their own "assisted migration" terminology and actions.
4. Facilitate respectful dialogue and understandings of worldview differences.
Retired now to her home state of Michigan, Barlow launched a new video series that builds upon the foundation laid by Torreya Guardians. Titled "Helping Forests Walk", it is a more reflective series on the topic of "assisted migration" than her 2014-2020 video series filmed across America: "Climate, Trees, and Legacy". The previous series featured field experience and learnings of these native trees: Torrey Pine, Joshua Tree (5 vids), Arizona Cypress, Rocky Mountain Trees (10 species), Engelmann Spruce (2 vids), "Becoming Passenger Pigeon" (eastern USA large-seeded trees), Alligator Juniper (9 vids), Redwoods and Sequoias (9 vids), and her 2015 lecture on assisted migration at Michigan Tech U. This new series will feature traditional natural history ways of observing and interpreting as a possible bridge between indigenous and modern science.
GOAL - Using citizen science to discover why some pawpaw patches produce little or no fruit in southern Michigan and the ecological nuances for attracting pollinators.
Note: This project became possible when Barlow and Dowd ended 18 years of living on the road, settling into Connie's homestate of Michigan in 2020. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Barlow gathered post-harvest seeds from a nearby large pawpaw orchard and sent seeds northward to volunteer planters — primarily to Indigenous planters in MI, WI, and NY.
• VIDEO: "Helping Subcanopy Trees Migrate" features two subcanopy species of the eastern USA. Pawpaw, while having a long north-south reach in its historic range, can benefit from "assisted range expansion" northward. Florida Torreya is an endangered glacial relict for which citizens, including Connie, have done what the official recovery program implementers have been unwilling to do — restore its health by nothing more difficult than planting seeds well to the north.
Indigenous values are advocated as well as the "natural history" style of observation and interpretation.
Filmed November 2022 while cleaning and sorting autumn 2022 seeds harvested from a private home in Clinton, NC. Here Connie reflects on "two decades of citizen action." YOUTUBE CAPTION begins:
Torreya Guardians is internationally known for conducting the first "assisted migration" action for a climate-endangered plant, Florida Torreya. Advocacy began in 2004, with actions ramping up in 2008.
This network of engaged citizens, however, relied on an "exception" (just for plants) in the Endangered Species Act in order to do so legally. Finally, in 2022 the federal agency in charge of endangered species proposed updating the regulations pertaining to "experimental populations" in order to facilitate its use for climate adaptation: helping species move to cooler habitats.
Below is an excerpt of the TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF 13 FAILURES.
1. FAILURE to include paleoecological scientific knowledge when discerning whether and for how long the risk of potential "invasiveness" in "recipient ecosystems" should stand as a barrier to beginning experimentation with poleward assisted migration of Florida torreya.
2. FAILURE to recognize and act upon the fact that species categorized as "glacial relicts" deserve expedited decision-making in this time of super-interglacial warming anthropogenically caused.
3. FAILURE to distinguish ultimate cause (Holocene warming) from proximate causes (various diseases) in posing and evaluating palliative actions and experiments for achieving species recovery.
4. FAILURE to visit and evaluate existing mature horticultural plantings in northward states, and from such assessments see for themselves that northward plantings are not impaired by disease and thus continue to evidence health, reproduction, and (in some cases) full naturalization in northward states....
BELOW: Table of contents of Barlow's 26-page petition, submitted to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
EXCERPT: JUSTIFICATIONS FOR DOWNLISTING are drawn from 15 years of accomplishments by citizen volunteers associating with Torreya Guardians. The accomplishments serving as justifications are described and linked to references in five topical sections, as listed below.
TORREYA GUARDIANS s a self-organized group of naturalists, botanists, ecologists, and others with a deep concern for biodiversity protection, who have chosen to use the internet as a tool for discussing ideas, posting plans, and taking a variety of actions in behalf of our most endangered conifer tree: Torreya taxifolia. There are no by-laws, officers, board, staff, overhead costs, dues, formal organizational structure, or physical location to this organization....
Results of Barlow's petition can be accessed here.
Connie Barlow's guest sermon (26 August 2018) for a Unitarian Universalist audience in Michigan conveys the anxiety and suffering of friends in Colorado, California, and Washington who are suffering yet another summer of forest fire danger, smoke, and flash flood warnings. Her message: Environmental damage (and consequent fear and anxiety) out West is clearly "21st Century." But climate change is mostly an abstract understanding in Michigan — where environmental concerns and calamities are still "20th Century".
In this guest sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Whidbey Island WA, Connie shares what she has learned while video-editing the first set of episodes of Dowd and Barlow's Post-Doom Conversations.
She describes 5 patterns:
(1) Diversity of outlooks; (2) Find a peer group; (3) Share stories; (4) Identity shift / myth; (5) Generational distinctions.
27 minutes Video - recorded December 2019; posted February 2020
• VIDEO 2020 Covid Legacy Pledge - in 2 parts on youtube
TO: Boomers and Beyond March/April 2020
RE: A Covid Legacy Pledge for Seniors — Turning fear into calm and crisis into generosity
by insisting on palliative care at home and/or saying no to ICU medical interventions
• VIDEO Part 1: Background - narration and commentary on "What and Why a Legacy Pledge by Seniors?"
This video was produced in the the second month of the covid crisis in the USA. Connie had written her own "Covid Legacy Pledge" to supplement her living will. Here she grounds her pledge to forego hospital interventions re covid on a depth understanding of how pervasive and natural death was for her immigrant maternal grandparents — and how her mother spoke of that experience and her own sense of generational justice as core for her own in-home choice of dying.
The final 24-minutes is an excerpt of a 2011 video that she and Michael Dowd partnered: "Death, Budgets, and Generational Justice. Part 1 of this legacy pledge video pair is 33 minutes.
ABOVE: Barlow and Dowd's "Climate Resources" page of original videos and links.
4-city "Climate Wake-Up" tour in Kentucky,
2013 via Kentucky Interfaith Power & Light
A 45-minute talk that Connie delivered in Prescott, Arizona, is the single best place to begin learning how rapid climate change is endangering even common trees of American forests — and why our descendants will need to step in and help those trees disperse seeds farther north than birds and mammals can transport them.
CLICK LEFT: Connie advocating for "assisted migration" at a conference in 2004. Two years later, she founded TorreyaGuardians.org
• The Economist, 2015. "The Torreya Guardians were at first seen as 'eco-terrorists spreading an invasive species', remembers Connie Barlow, the group's chief propagandist. She rejects that charge, pointing out that she is only moving the tree within America. She also thinks that drastic action of this kind will soon be widespread: 'We are the radical edge of what is going to become a mainstream action.' Online access: "A Modern Ark: To save endangered species move them to more congenial places".
• New York Times, 2014. "In 2008, Connie Barlow, a biologist and conservationist, helped move an endangered conifer tree in Florida north by planting seedlings in cooler regions. Now she is working in the West. "I just assisted in the migration of the alligator juniper in New Mexico by planting seeds in Colorado," she said. "We have to. Climate change is happening so fast and trees are the least capable of moving."
"Building an Ark for the Anthropocene".
The "assisted migration" ongoing project of Torreya Guardians is regularly cited in academic literature on climate adaptation controversies in biodversity and ecosystems protection. Here, Connie Barlow presents the first (highly illustrated) talk to professionals. Speaking to faculty and students at Michigan Technological University's School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, Barlow presents the history of the "assisted migration" controversy — highlighting the reasons why foresters have already taken actions where conservation biologists fear to tread. (filmed Sept 11, 2015)
Videos by Connie Barlow on the Torreya Guardians Website
Educational VIDEO series to document the citizen science projects of the all-volunteer Torreya Guardians in human-assisted migration of America's most endangered conifer tree, Florida Torreya, northward in this time of rapid climate change. Connie Barlow founded the organization.
Climate is warming too fast for large-seeded plant species to migrate north via the animal partners (e.g., squirrels) that have dependably dispersed seeds for millions of years. In 2008, a group of citizen-naturalists (Torreya Guardians) legally planted 31 seedlings of the endangered Florida conifer Torreya taxifolia within private forests in the mountains of North Carolina. Connie Barlow reports their learnings during the first five years.
75 minutes - published November 7, 2013
• MOST RECENT VIDEO (2023):
This 70-minute VIDEO begins with a celebration of the 1,000+ seeds our grower in Ohio produced Autumn 2023. The rest of the video is a presentation by the group's founder, Connie Barlow, of the long and shifting history of scientific speculation and (sometimes faulty) assumptions about the ultimate cause(s) of this ancient conifer's sudden demise in its tiny historical range in Florida.
BACKGROUND: Motivated by the July 2023 adoption of a new regulation permitting the agency in charge of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to expand recovery efforts beyond the "historical range" — especially if climate change had already damaged prospects there — Connie began a scholarly search of new papers that might offer guidance for Florida Torreya. What she found was a "paradigm shift" (beginning around 2016) that offered new and compelling scientific reasons for the ESA implementers to follow the lead of this citizen group in "assisted migration" poleward as a way to help this tree regain its ability to fight native diseases. Central to this new understanding is the discovery that all plant tissues — including seeds — harbor beneficial fungal and bacterial partners: what is now called the Plant Microbiome and the Seed Microbiome.
Videos by Connie Barlow on "Climate, Trees, and Legacy
Annotated list of all episodes in this video series, or via titles at right:
CLICK LEFT: 42-minute VIDEOBLOG launching Connie's educational video series, "Climate, Trees, and Legacy" in 2014. Here she introduces a learning and action series for citizen activism in helping trees adapt to climate change — species by species, decade by decade.
This "assisted migration" in a time of unprecedented climate shift will be increasingly necessary in the decades ahead. Foresters can create the maps to show us where species will need to move to.
But we citizen naturalists will play a complementary role in ensuring that the full diversity of genotypes keeps pace with a warming and drying continent. Human action will mimic what birds, rodents, and other native seed dispersers have been able to accomplish on their own in previous periods of Earth history, when warming occurred at much a slower pace.
Summer 2016 Connie experimented with "coyote-style" and "elk-style" assisted migration of Alligator Juniper seeds into northern New Mexico. Multi-part video series accessible through her "Climate, Trees, and Legacy".
ABOVE LEFT: August 2018 Connie delivers a "Story for All Ages" about stages of life of Monarch Butterflies at People's Church (UU) of Ludington, MI.
Autumn 2016 Connie began advocating for documentation (data + video + oral history) of the amazing number of thriving specimens of California Sequoia and Coast Redwood already planted in the Pacific Northwest. Above she stands with a Sequoia that had been planted in a golf-course landscaping in Portland, Oregon — and now in someone's front yard (as the golf course succumbed to urban construction a half-century ago).
Below left, in a Redwood forest in California. Below right with a Coast Redwood planted 70 years ago near Seattle, Washington.
Field experiences and online learning have culminated in sufficient information for citizens to launch their own efforts for easily gathering cones, testing seed viability, and dispersing seeds (as the wind would do, if given thousands of years to track climate change) into fog-rich areas of the Pacific Northwest coast. The likely best microsite: patches of tall Sword Fern beneath deciduous canopy of Big-Leaf maple. 1 hour - published March 2020WATCH
(with Michael Dowd) why the teachings of Thomas Berry are now even more urgent. (1 page in PDF)
• "Deep-Time Lags: Lessons from Pleistocene Ecology" 2009
PDF of chapter by Connie Barlow in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, 2009, MIT Press.
Connie's photoessay of her 7-week interaction with a "sacred site of the epic of evolution".
• "Rewilding Torreya taxifolia: Reflections by Connie Barlow" 2008
August 2008 commentary on the historic "assisted migration" of 31 seedlings of this endangered plant to private lands in the mountains of North Carolina, by Torreya Guardians. Click for PDF.
Illustrated webpage of citizen science, created as advocacy to influence 2010 updating of the official Endangered Species Act Recovery Plan for Torreya taxifolia.
"TORREYA STATE PARK perches on the steep, sandy banks of the Apalachicola, where the river twists slowly through the Florida Panhandle toward the Gulf of Mexico. This is one of the most isolated spots in Florida, rich only in plant life and prisons, stupefyingly hot in summer and eerily quiet nearly all year round. Most park visitors are on their way somewhere else, and when Connie Barlow stopped here on a winter day in 1999, she was no exception . . . "
SEE ALSO Connie's eco-advocacy work in Audubon Magazine, May/June 2010, in an article titled "Guardian Angels."
Review of book by Hazel Delcourt, published in Winter 2004 issue of Wild Earth magazine. Full text.
• "Goodbye Eternal Frontier", 2002 (10 pages)
Published in the Summer 2002 issue of Wild Earth magazine, this article is grounded on the 2001 book by Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier. It presents the 65 million year deep time story of the North American Continent, questioning what it means to be native to this continent: spiritual implications and practical recommendations for conservation biology. PDF.
ABOVE LEFT: VIDEO: "Mammoths, Overkill, and a Deep-Time Perspective on Pleistocene Extinctions"
Connie Barlow summarizes the world-wide paleontological evidence in support of the Overkill Theory of
"extinction of the massive", proposed by Paul S. Martin, in this "Coming Home to North America" program
delivered as a keynote presentation in 2004 in Lexington Kentucky (EarthSpirit Rising Conference).
ABOVE RIGHT:
Annotated charts used in Connie's North America overkill presentation.
ABOVE LEFT: Connie leading an outdoor "Coming Home to North America" ritual.
ABOVE RIGHT: The map Connie uses to show what North America looked like at the beginning of the Cenozoic period. (The "Bearpaw Seaway" separated the continent; yellow star shows where the end-Cretaceous impact hit.)
• "Trees Who Remember", 2001 (5 pages)
Published in Trees for Life Engagement Calendar, 2001. Retyped for online publishing in 2010, with lots of photos added (including photos of Connie's mentor Paul Martin and memorabilia from the "Mammoth Memorial Service" that the two conjured up together and held at the Mammoth Site in Hot Spring SD, 1999. PDF.
CLICK LEFT: 5-minute VIDEO (left) of Connie reading Leopold's "On a Monument to a Pigeon" at the Passenger Pigeon Monument in Wisconsin.
36 minute AUDIO of Connie reciting four items in honor of evolutionary ecologist Aldo Leopold (who envisioned the first designated wilderness in the world: the Gila. In September 2000, Connie sat on a log in the West Fork of the Gila and recited into a tape recorder 4 parts: (1) in-the-moment observations of the immediate surrounds, (2) "We Live in a Mythic Time": unpublished advocacy piece in behalf of the newly rewilded Mexican Gray Wolf (submitted to the Silver City Daily Press), (3) Connie's favorite excerpts from Aldo's A Sand County Almanac, and (4) Connie reciting the essay she wrote for the Trees for Life annual engagement calendar (published 2001, see above).
An essay in support of Paul Martin's proposal to "Bring Back the Elephants" to North America, published in the same (Spring) issue. This essay also appears in an anthology of essays, Wild Earth, published by Milkweed Press in 2002. (Both essays are also available as part of the archived journal issue of Wild Earth, Vol 9 no. 1, here.) Watch Connie lead the congregation in the song, "Bring Back the Elephants," at the memorial service for Paul: video: song
• "Re-Storying Biodiversity by Way of Science"Wild Earth, 1997
More extracts from Connie's 1997 book, published in the Spring issue. PDF.
• "Because It Is My Religion"Wild Earth, 1996
Extracts from Connie's 1997 book, Green Space, Green Time, published in the Fall issue. PDF.
• "Connie Barlow slashes through the shopping-mall contrivances of trashy consumerism to regain communication with the living, breathing, wilderness of our planet. Celebrating a corrigible evolutionary epic she argues, mainly through lively conversation with scientists and scholars, for a new value-laden, science-based religion wider than the sky." — Lynn Margulis
• "We have no current more crucial task today than to ground ourselves in the inherent meaningfulness of the natural world. This important book is a vital contribution to that work." — Derrick Jensen
• "A well-informed and passionate intellect, Connie Barlow is the ideal person to guide us through a thicket of ideas that bring force to the greening of society through science." — Loyal Rue
Barlow and her husband, Michael Dowd, were awarded "Religious Humanists of the Year" at an event associated with the Unitarian Universalist 2016 General Assembly. (Barlow's section begins at timecode 6:33 and ends at 17:36).
Connie Barlow offers what she has learned while video-editing the first set of episodes of Dowd and Barlow's Post-Doom Conversations.
Barlow describes 5 patterns:
(1) Diversity of outlooks; (2) Find a peer group; (3) Share stories; (4) Identity shift / myth; (5) Generational distinctions.
27 minutes • (recorded December 2019; posted February 2020)
___________________
• VIDEO: "Your Brain's Creation Story"
In August 2009, Connie Barlow (with Michael Dowd) were theme speakers at a Unitarian Universalist summer camp in Puget Sound, Washington. Connie took the lead in the illustrated presentation on the practical lessons and uses of evolutionary brain science for improving our lives — and for provisioning children and teens with an evolutionary perspective that can help them make better choices and develop healthy habits, despite having inherited "mismatched instincts" that pose challenges in modern-day life.
Click LEFT for 54-minute VIDEO on YouTube.
• "Death, Budgets, and Generational Justice" AUDIO or VIDEO
In August 2011, Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd gave twinned theme talks at two events in the American West: "Evolutionize Your Life" (by Michael) and "Evolutionize Your Death and Legacy" (by Connie). Inspired by the audience response and poignant storytelling that ensued, Connie wrote a call-to-action in essay form, urging her boomer generation to transform the debilitating and financially untenable death-denial that pervades American culture — largely because of literalist Christianity that interprets death as "the enemy."
June 2008, Connie Barlow presented the guest sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canandaigua, NY.
Titled, "Celebrating Evolution", Connie presents a sampling of topics and programs she developed on this theme, including how she presents these topics to children.
April 2005, Connie Barlow presented the SONG and CHARTS version of her multi-year presentations on death. In later years in her death presentations she eliminated the song and switched from charts to powerpoint.
This earliest version has an immediacy and audience involvement that is diminished in the later, more "professional" versions of the same program.
Critiquing Dale McGowan's invited lecture at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists nationwide (in June), Connie calls for a reassessment of the way kids in religious liberally families and institutions are taught "religion". Our postmodern celebration of diversity and advocacy of free choice actually means we deny our children a basic human requirement: "a coherent cosmology (creation story / worldview) through which to enjoy and securely navigate the years of childhood wonder, learning, and innocence." (posted July 2010)
• "We Are Stardust: The Epic of Evolution in Children's Religious Education" 2009
Originally published as an entry in the 2004 Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (edited by Bron Taylor), Barlow's article was cited in the Wikipedia entry on Aldo Leopold: "Science writer Connie Barlow says Leopold wrote eloquently from a perspective that today would be called Religious Naturalism.[21]" This same citation sentence also appears in the religious subsection of the Loren Eiseley Wikipedia entry.
LISTEN to the hour-long June 7, 2009 audio interview
• "Leaving a Legacy: Proposal for a New Health Insurance Program" 2008
GOAL: to create a new governmental or nonprofit, voluntary group Health
Insurance policy that (1) honors death as a natural / sacred part of the life
process, and (2) distributes the financial savings thus accrued between
group members (80%) and charities chosen by the dying or their guardians
(20%). Click for PDF.
• "Even The Heavens Are Not Immortal" 2005 (no longer online)
Interview by Craig Hamilton of Connie Barlow in the Fall 2005 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine.
LEFT: 10-minute YouTube VIDEO of the conclusion to Connie Barlow's "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes" presentation in Ashland OR, 2009.
"Death As Natural and Generative in the Cosmos", 2004
Text (and chart) used in public presentations to show how, in the last 500 years, discoveries by geographers, geologists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, cell biologists, astronomers and astrophysicists have demonstrated that death is not just something that happens to individual plants and animals but also is a natural and creative process affecting mountains, seaways, continents, species, and even stars and galaxies). Full text
• "Garden of Eden on Your Dinner Plate?", 2004
Essay published in the Spring 2004 issue of EarthLight, in
PDF.
• "Stardust: Toward a New Periodic Table of Elements", revised 2004
Written for this website, and to support the "We Are Made of Stardust" ritual also on this website, this document provides an easy introduction to the broad outlines and fascinating details of how the various chemical elements were created in different kinds of stars. Full text or PDF.
ABOVE LEFT: 3-minute YouTube Music Video Sing-Along (with displayed lyrics) by Connie Barlow singing her stardust song, SONG: "In the Beginning"
ABOVE RIGHT: Connie shared theme-speaker position at this 2004 gathering. Her biography for the event.
• "An Immense Journey: Religious Naturalism and the Great Story", 2003
Written for the "Metareligious Essays" page of this website, this personal essay shows how the Great Story can enrich the experience of religious naturalism. Exemplars of this tradition include Julian Huxley, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, and Annie Dillard; in PDF or on-screen. Note: The Wikipedia entry on Aldo Leopold credits Connie Barlow for identifying Leopold as a religious naturalist: "Science writer Connie Barlow says Leopold wrote eloquently from a perspective that today would be called Religious Naturalism.[21]" This same citation sentence also appears in the religious subsection of the Loren Eiseley Wikipedia entry.
• "An Immense Journey: A Religious Naturalist Learns to Celebrate the Great Story", 2002 (unpublished)
This was an early, less formal draft of the essay above. Because it includes memories of my participation in the "Mammoth Memorial Service" in South Dakota (and because it is more free-flowing and less directed toward serving as an example of religions naturalism), I have preserved it as a separate, unpublished document in PDF.
• "The Judgment of the Birds", 2000 (unpublished)
This memoir, which uses the same title as one of Loren Eiseley's revered essays, was written soon after (and which describes) my solo visioning experience in the Gila Wilderness in July 2000; included within it is a flashback to a previous solo wilderness experience in the Gila backcountry much farther upstream on Little Creek, and that occurred July 1997. PDF. Shortly after writing the essay (September 2000), I recorded an audio version ("Loren and Me") that begins with the ambient night sounds, followed by a reading of excerpts from Eiseley's "Judgment of the Birds" essay, then my own memoir, followed again by night sounds. The recording took place outdoors, at night, on a rock ledge along a shallow side canyon of the West Fork, right after the trail begins. Click to listen to 36 minute AUDIO
• "A Fierce Green Fire", 2000 (unpublished)
Letter sent for the "Reader's Forum" section of the local newspaper in Silver City, New Mexico, referring to an Aldo Leopold essay in support of her advocacy for returning the Mexican Gray Wolf to the Gila Wilderness Area. PDF
• "The Epic of Evolution"Earth Matters (Northwest Earth Institute), 1999
2-page adaptation of Connie's 1997 book, Green Space, Green Time, published in the Spring issue.
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• "The Way of Science and the Epic of Evolution" UU World, 1998
Extracts from Connie's 1997 book, Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science, published as the cover story for the Unitarian Universalists magazine (Nov/Dec). PDF
• "The Way of Science"The Humanist, 1998
More extracts from Connie's 1997 book, published in the member magazine of The Humanist Society (Mar/Apr). PDF
• "Evolution and the AAAS"Science and Spirit, 1998
A report of the 1997 "Epic of Evolution Conference" held in Chicago and sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. PDF
• "Evolving the Epic"Epic of Evolution Quarterly, Fall 1998. PDF
• "Classic Quotations on the Epic of Evolution"Epic of Evolution, 1998
Fifty inspiring quotations, ranging from Charles Darwin and Maria Montessori to Carl Sagan and Loren Eiseley, to Brian Swimme and Ursula Goodenough. PDF
• "The Epic of Evolution: A Report of Current Events"Teilhard Perspective, 1997
Reporting on contributions by members of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. PDF
• "Because It Is My Religion"Wild Earth, 1996
Extracts from Connie's 1997 book, Green Space, Green Time, published in the Fall issue. PDF
• "A Jostling on the Shelves"Teilhard Perspective, 1996
Connie contributed a book review series in 1996 June and December
• "Clouds and the Crystal Bell"unpublished, 1998
Reflections on a natural death and hospice. PDF. NOTE: The "Clouds" stress-reduction audio mentioned in this text is available through NewHealthVisions.com.
Videos by Connie on Religious Naturalism (pro bono)
• Online Essay (Barlow and Dowd 2012)
• VIDEO (58 min; left; Barlow 2013)
Excerpt: "Here lies an extraordinary opportunity for theologically progressive institutions to do what the fundamentalist churches cannot. Liberal churches can offer the youngers an evolutionary worldview that delights children in their wonder years, offers immensely practical insights and guidance for those going through puberty (by teaching them about "mismatched instincts" and "supernormal stimuli"), and empowers teens to ponder the meaning of life — and their life — as they edge toward adulthood."
• In 2013: 22 minute VIDEO of Connie's 2013 SERMON on this topic was reformated with images and posted on youtube in 2026). The sermon was delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Hendersonville, NC
In 2026 Connie posted a 22 minute VIDEO of her 2013 SERMON on this topic.
The sermon audio was reformated with images and posted on youtube.The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Hendersonville, NC was the venue of her sermon.
"My Universe Story" (children's curriculum) (WORK IN PROGRESS)
8-9 month curriculum for provisioning 3rd and 4th graders in liberal religious, Montessori, or private-school sessions with a coherent, meaningful, and fun worldview. 28 major events in the 13.7 billion year story of the Universe are celebrated, in order, one or two per week. For each, the child selects a representative bead, culminating in the final project of stringing them together into a loop or necklace. Crucial are that the final 2 events/beads pertain to the child's own birth — and hope for their future. Click here for PDF.
"Remember Who You Are: Living a Mythic Life" (children's curriculum) 2009
12-part curriculum for assisting middle school youth in the life passage from childhood ("Explorers in the Garden") to early adolescence ("Thespians at the Oasis"), which uses the understandings drawn from the 2008 book by Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, and using scene-by-scene the Disney movie The Lion King as a beloved bridge and focus for the middle school mindset. Overview and full curriculum available for free viewing and downloand.
"Tree Talks About Death" (children's story) 2009
This story is a non-picture book, for reading interactively to a child (ages 6 through 11, or any post-teen, playful adult). The goal is to meaningfully and memorably convey a mythic tale through which the deep understandings, thanks to the scientific worldview, of the creative role that death plays at all scales of the cosmos can be grasped by both head and heart. Download in PDF. Listen to the AUDIO of Connie reading aloud this story in 2009. In 2024 she added images and text overlays to the audio, and posted the VIDEO on youtube.
"The River of Life" (children's curriculum) - a.k.a "Ancestor's Tale" or "We Are All Cousins 2009
From 2006 - 2009, this program created by Connie (but grounded in the evolutionary data offered by Richard Dawkins in his 2004 book, Ancestor's Tale) was the primary kids program she delivered personally at more than 40 church and private school settings. In November 2009, she made the entire curriculum available online for free download. See VIDEO below of Connie presenting this program to kids in 2011.
"12-Part Stardust Curriculum for Children" 2007
80-page PDF of lesson plans for teaching elementary-age children our relationship to stars and the Universe.
LEFT: Part 1 of a (two-part) 90-minute VIDEO of Connie presenting "Ancestor's Tale for Kids" to a mixed-age group of children in 2011 at a Unitarian Universalist church in Georgia, USA.
After the video starts playing, we recommend you click on the YouTube button in the lower-right part of the picture screen. That will take you to the video's full YouTube page. From there, you can read the long text caption that summarizes the highlights. On the YouTube page, click on the gray "Show more" directly below the truncated text.
Notice that the text summary includes a full TABLE OF CONTENTS with linked timestops (in blue), which you can click to advance instantly to that portion of the video.
Part 2 VIDEO of Ancestor's Tale for Kids opens at confluence #11. Two minutes into that program a child asks why some people don't believe in evolution. Watch Connie's imaginative response!
ABOVE LEFT: 5-minute VIDEO of Connie Barlow speaking to adults on how the science of "stardust" (especially when presented evocatively to children) can help modern peoples recover a deeply felt relationship to "ancestors" in the night sky. See also "From Stardust to Us", The Spiral, 2001:
a PDF Report (co-written with children's book author Jennifer Morgan) of guiding children at "The Walk Through Time" exhibit.
ABOVE RIGHT: 7-minute VIDEO: "Story for All Ages" at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, NJ (October 2013). Connie improvised a story to accompany a guest sermon by Michael Dowd ("The Future Is Calling Us To Greatness"), and used these props: her necklace of Great Story Beads, Michael's long strand of Great Story Beads, the "Earth from Space" stained glass window in the sanctuary, a pair of Hubble Space photos she has on poster board, and the children themselves.
• AUDIO of a 6-minute Story for All Ages that Connie delivered at the Sunday morning service of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Indianapolis in September 2014. Here she uses leaves of a tuliptree and nuts of a walnut tree she collected that morning on the church grounds to (a) help the kids appreciate identify and enjoy these trees and (b) gently introduce them to the idea that their generation will need to help such trees move north in tandem with a changing climate.
Advance the video at right to 1:00 minute into the program for a sample reading from Connie's chapter.
• "Evolution Now: A Manifesto for Our UU Congregations", sermon by Connie Barlow delivered August 2008 - a plea for Unitarian Universalists (and other liberal religious folk) to ensure that we give our children a coherent, inspiring creation story to guide their lives and love for all of creation. Click to listen online or read in PDF.
Critiquing Dale McGowan's invited lecture at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists nationwide (in June), Connie calls for a reassessment of the way kids in religious liberally families and institutions are taught "religion". Our postmodern celebration of diversity and advocacy of free choice actually means we deny our children a basic human requirement: "a coherent cosmology (creation story / worldview) through which to enjoy and securely navigate the years of childhood wonder, learning, and innocence." (posted July 2010)
Barlow conferring with forestry scientist Jerry Rehfeldt
in Idaho, 2016. (Photo from a video.)
LEFT: Video-documenting 10 years of Florida Torreya growth at the Lake Junaluska site, near Waynesville, North Carolina (2018). (Photo captured from a Torreya Guardians video.)
RIGHT: Barlow planting a torreya seedling in western North Carolina that had germinated from seed (2018).
ABOVE: Barlow sorting Alligator Juniper berries for assisted migration in northern New Mexico, 2016.
The portrait is a screen capture of her video at right.
LEFT: Barlow in 2016 standing in front of a redwood planted at Seabeck Conference Center (Kitsap Peninsula, northwest of Seattle WA) that is now just a few years older than she is. (Stills from Connie's video.)
RIGHT: Three years later (autumn 2019) Barlow inventories the younger plantings of redwoods — and their offspring — that are flourishing in the native regrowth Douglas-fir forest onsite (toward which Barlow is pointing in the 2016 photo).
LEFT: Barlow with a Coast Redwood in a wealthy section of Capitol Hill Seattle, fall of 2019. She was dismayed to discover that, while the redwood benefitted from a watered lawn, there were no cones on or under the tree — likely owing to lack of pollen drift as there were no other redwoods nearby.
RIGHT: Barlow loving-up a Giant Sequoia in an old neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, in 2016. Notice how distinct the leaves are of this inland California (west slope of Sierras) close cousin of the Coast Redwood that Connie works directly with. (Both stills were captured from the same video.)
LEFT: Connie Barlow casting seeds of Coast Redwood into native sword ferns, with Bigleaf maple nearby, on Whidbey Island (northwest of Seattle, WA) February 2020. Stills drawn from a video video.
RIGHT: For the seed-casting ceremony, Connie made facepaint from the dark red tannin crystals that spill out with the seeds when redwood cones are shook.
LEFT: Connie in front of a young redwood trunk near Eureka CA, surrounded by Swordferns, which are native all the way up the coast into British Columbia. Swordfern is a member of her favorite fern genus, Polystichum. Because redwoods and ferns associate with the same kind of mycorrhizal fungi, they are partnered below ground; in California, they are almost always together.
RIGHT: Polystichum fern genus is also represented in the eastern USA, where species Christmas Fern is often the only evergreen fern in sight during the winter months. Here it shrouds a young Florida Torreya December 2018, which was freeplanted from seed by Connie into the southern Appalachians. Because snow rarely covers the ground, the evergreen fern fronds help Torreya escape notice by hungry deer.
ABOVE: Photos of Connie ca. 1999, re her 2001 book, The Ghosts of Evolution. Left is bowl of anachronistic fruit. Right is with Paul S. Martin (who was Connie's mentor
and who wrote the book's foreword).
ABOVE LEFT: Connie with husband Michael Dowd in April 2002.
ABOVE RIGHT: Connie and Michael with Thomas Berry in 2002. Berry was the inspiration for the couple to launch their "evolutionary epic" itinerant ministry. They are standing along their first van. "Ecozoic" on the license plate is a term Berry coined in hopes of an ecological future for humans within the Earth community of life.
