For our next Morning Coffee webinar on Thursday, November 12, we’re stepping out from behind the scenes to introduce ourselves. The Understory, formerly Partners for Climate Action, supports locally led work to care for the Hudson Valley’s ecosystems and communities. Join us to hear why we changed our name, what we’ve learned through our grantmaking, programming, and storytelling, and how you can be part of what comes next.

Executive Director Bob Dandrew will be joined by the people behind our programs: 

• Pollinate HV: offers free resources for planting for pollinators 

• Funding Futures: helps residents work together to identify and fund local environmental and civic priorities

• The Wild Trust: focused on forest health

• H.E.R.E., the Hudson Estuary Resilience Effort: home to our local expert guilds, H.E.R.E. Journal, and the $4 million Regional Resilience Grants. 

Together, these programs work toward the same goal: ecological and social resilience across the Hudson Valley.

The Understory and Hudson Hall present The H.E.R.E. Journal Salon with Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Moderated by Margaret Roach.

Hudson Hall and H.E.R.E. Journal are honored to welcome Issue 1 contributor and renowned writer and scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants) to Hudson Hall for a lecture, conversation, and book signing.

The evening will begin with a talk from Robin and continue with a conversation with New York Times garden writer and best selling author Margaret Roach. An audience Q&A followed by a book signing with Robin and Margaret will close out the evening.

Tickets are $25. This event will be livestreamed.

About Robin Wall Kimmerer: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in and numerous publications.

Robin’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (November 2024), is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

About Margaret Roach: Margaret Roach is a longtime garden writer—first for Newsday newspaper, then for Martha Stewart Living (where she became the company’s EVP/Editorial Director) and the last seven growing seasons for The New York Times. She also creates a website, podcast, and weekly newsletter called A Way to Garden, the title of her 1989 book that was reissued in 2019 in an all-new edition.

Margaret has written several other books, including a 2011 memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There, about dropping out of corporate and city life for a rural one, and in 2013, The Backyard Parables. Her public-radio podcast, called “A Way to Garden,” is in its 18th year.

About H.E.R.E. Journal: H.E.R.E. Journal is a print magazine about the Hudson Valley—the ecology, the people, and where the two meet. Encompassing the tidal river and watershed, the Hudson Estuary region is a truly unique part of the world that has long drawn artists and adventurers of all stripes. Exploring a region that has long been a front line for conversations about conservation, H.E.R.E. Journal seeks to think more expansively about this place’s history and ecology, and to learn how we can all better take care of it.

H.E.R.E Journal is a nonprofit print journal that publishes twice a year, working with writers, photographers, and artists from the region to tell stories that explain how this place works, why people come here, and what being here asks of us. H.E.R.E. Journal is a publication of The Understory.

Last July, a slow-moving storm stalled over our region and dropped an historic amount of rain – up to 12 inches in just 24-30 hours . Roads washed out, Amtrak stopped running, and several counties declared a state of emergency. What happened, and what does it tell us about the weather ahead?

Atmospheric scientist and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Anton Seimon returns to Morning Coffee to make sense of a remarkable weather year. Drawing on decades of observing Hudson Valley storms, he’ll unpack the July floods and other recent weather extremes, the role of a warming climate in making them worse, explain what this winter’s strengthening El Niño could mean for us, and share the latest on global climate trends. Bring your questions: the second half of the session is open conversation.

Bio
Dr. Anton Seimon is an atmospheric scientist and National Geographic Explorer based in Columbia County. He teaches in Bard College’s Master of Science in Climate Science and Policy program. A tornado researcher and veteran storm chaser, he led the National Geographic–supported El Reno Survey, a crowd-sourced study of the largest tornado ever documented, and spends each spring on the Great Plains studying how tornadoes form. Beyond the valley, he coordinates long-term monitoring of climate change impacts in the high Andes of Peru and has worked with conservationists to plan for climate change in tropical Africa using Earth system models.