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Q&A with Nadine Canter, Communications Director

Northeast Wilderness Trust is delighted to welcome Nadine Canter to the team in the newly established role of Communications Director. In this position, Nadine shares the stories of NEWT’s wild places with press and media, develops communications strategy, and oversees communications materials.

We sat down with Nadine for a Q&A to share her knowledge and passion for land with the Wilderness Trust community.

NEWT: Tell us a little about your love of the outdoors. Was there any particular place or experience that was foundational to your relationship with nature?

Nadine: As a child my happy places were in the woods and in the water. Nothing else made as much sense. Going inside at dark or when school started each fall, or to eat or even for a bio-break just didn’t seem right. I can’t think of a singular place that was more foundational than another. I was so lucky! I do know that my first multi-day backpacking trip at 10 years old in the Massachusetts Berkshires along Mt. Fitch, Mt. Williams and Mt. Greylock gaining 3,000+ feet of elevation mostly in the first mile made a huge impression on meafter I stopped crying from the weight of my rucksack. I was fearless in the ocean learning to swim off the Massachusetts coast. I thought everyone’s father threw them into the waves for fun.

As an adult I discovered the Pacific Northwest and more truly wild places where I witnessed catastrophic atrocities cross country skiing in clear-cut old growth forests and couldn’t stop crying; I backpacked in the Cascade Mountains among wildflowers and glaciers; and I sea kayaked with Orcas in the San Juan Islands. It was all miraculous. Upon moving back home to raise my kids in the Northeast I discovered remote and protected lakes in the Adirondacks and thought I’d gone to heaven. There is nowhere else I’d rather be than walking along a river, watching a waterfall cascade, paddling on a lake with the loons, or napping on a beach listening to waves lap along the shore. I want my great-great-great-grandchildren to know ancient forests and clean water. I don’t think that is asking too much, but we’ve got work to do to protect us from ourselves.

NEWT: What makes you excited to work at Northeast Wilderness Trust?

Nadine: Every single day I get to help make forever-wild land conservation happen. As one of our board members phrases it, we get to help the land speak. I get to represent that, being a voice to the non-human beings who need their freedom returned so they and we humans can all flourish. If lands and waterways are returned to their wild state the trees, the soil, the critters can all self-will and return to nature, untrammeled by us humans and our need to consume and extract.

NEWT: What was your career path leading up to your role as Communications Director at NEWT?

Nadine: I’ve had a knowingness since high school that we humans were losing something big with our addiction to media. What Donnella Meadows called the “Informationsphere” had been and still is co-opting our attention and controlling our stories by hijacking our intuitions and disconnecting our hearts from our minds, telling us what to feel and how to think, fed by a monetized system sucking the life out of every living being. I knew we were losing touch with our true natures and therefore were cut off from being animate and inter-dependent with the more than human world. I knew our anthropocentric ways focused upon our own survival at the expense of others was the wrong path. I have been trying to find the words and the root cause of this dangerous path for more than three decades with my sharpened pencils. I studied media and society, how worldviews are shaped, and the codes and modes we humans developed to share information. My life’s work has been driven by understanding the roots of information systems.  Whether I’m in the classroom teaching, writing a press release, designing a community relations program, or holding open spaces for those seeking something more, I know that inherently inside each of us humans is a place where we can hear ourselves breathe out and the trees breathe in, and thus know we are part of something much greater than ourselves that needs respect and protection.