In 2003, my family and I had to leave the estate in rural New York that my parents had cared for over so many decades. How did your upbringing influence your outdoor experience? In your book, you refer to “geographies of experience” that affect our relationship to land. I was looking at issues like the power of privilege, difference, and identity, and how those factors interact with the landscape. And that's how I came to focus more on the environment itself. I thought it was only maps, which is what a lot of people think! But we say that everything is geographical: people's relationship with place, people's relationship to the environment, people’s relationships to one another. back in the States, my professor said to me, “you know, you should choose geography.” At the time, I had no idea that was even a discipline. I was trekking and reading a lot of travel adventure books, and of all the people making these journeys, there was nothing about anybody who looked like me, and I had read everything that I could find. I still wasn't thinking about the outdoors or the environment specifically, but a lot of what I was doing revolved around it. During all this time, I had so much exposure to the world, and I was particularly focused on issues related to women. I would travel, then come back and save my money for a year or six months, then went to East Africa, and then I lived in Nepal for a year and a half in a small village. I was acting back in the ’80s in New York and LA, and toward the end of that period, I started backpacking in other parts of the world. Carolyn Finney: I was an actor for 11 years, so my heart is in the arts. How did you become an “accidental environmentalist” as you studied these relationships to public spaces?ĭr. Your book explores this tension through the context of our country’s history of slavery and Jim Crow laws that have affected the relationship of African-Americans to the outdoors. Central Park Conservancy: It’s become abundantly clear just how important green space is to the health of New Yorkers, and simultaneously, how all New Yorkers don’t experience green space in the same way.

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