Steve Blackmer

Steve Blackmer is founder and executive director of Kairos Earth, a non-profit organization based in Canterbury, NH, that seeks to renew a widespread understanding of the natural world as a bearer of the sacred and to restore this awareness as a foundation of both religious practice and practical action to conserve the Earth. He serves also as priest at Church of the Woods -- a place of spiritual practice and transformation for people who encounter the divine in nature.

Steve spent the first part of his career working as an organizer and advocate for forest conservation and forest-based community development in New Hampshire and the Northern Forest region of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. Over a span of 25 years, Steve held leadership positions with the Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Alliance, Appalachian Mountain Club and Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and served on boards of numerous conservation organizations at the local, state and national levels. He holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College in Anthropology and a Master's of Forestry from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale.

In 2009, Steve returned to school to seek a deeper understanding of the worldviews that enable humans to do such harm to the earth (and to each other) and how the environmental movement can tap into the transformational power of religious and spiritual traditions. After receiving a Master of Arts in Religion & Environment from Yale Divinity School in 2012 and being ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, Steve established Kairos Earth and Church of the Woods. He is seeking to renew the ancient human understanding of the Earth as sacred, and therefore as inherently worthy of reverence and care.

"If we truly understood the whole Earth as sacred -- and lived accordingly," Steve believes, "it would change everything."