Combining Science with Poetry to Protect Post-Fire Forests: the Activism of Maya Khosla

Photo: Jessica Layton.

Maya Khosla has been selected to receive the Fund for Wild Nature’s Grassroots Activist Award for 2023. Maya’s environmental activism involves a remarkable mixture of her roles as a scientist, filmmaker, and award-winning writer that has led to her being a prominent voice in the protection of post-fire forests.

Maya was born in London, where her father has working for India’s foreign service. Her father’s work meant that Maya subsequently grew up in many countries, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Bhutan, and Myanmar, as well as the UK and India. She came to the US for college. There she experienced an environmental awakening after the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984 when a chemical leak from a Union Carbide factory killed thousands of people and injured hundreds of thousands more. In response, Maya decided to study aquatic toxicology.

After getting her graduate degrees, Maya moved to California and assisted the National Park Service at Muir Woods on a project cataloguing the many habitat types in the park. She wrestled with how best to share this information with the public. She recalls, “I realized that one had to go beyond the lens of pure science to rivet the attention […]

Full article: Combining Science with Poetry to Protect Post-Fire Forests: the Activism of Maya Khosla

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