Religious Naturalist Association Advisor
Connie Barlow is an author of popular science books and articles, and developer of THE GREAT STORY website. Connie’s 2001 book, The Ghosts of Evolution (Basic Books), was Amazon.com’s top-recommended science book for several months. Her previous books, Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science(Copernicus Books), Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life (MIT Press), and From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences(MIT Press), all explore the nexus of science, meaning, and inspiration.
She is founding member and webmaster of Torreya Guardians, an internet community of botanists, naturalists, and others dedicated to ensuring the continuing persistence in the wild of America’s most endangered conifer tree: Torreya taxifolia. The group’s efforts in moving this tree northward in a time of rapid climate change have been showcased in Orion, Audubon, and other conservation magazines. In the 1990s she contributed articles to Wild Earth magazine toward encouraging others in conservation to develop “deep-time eyes” by way of learning the history of evolutionary change and paleoecological interactions. In 2014, she launched her videoblog series, “Climate, Trees, and Legacy”.
Barlow, an evolutionary humanist and Unitarian Universalist, is also a well-known developer of curricula for children’s religious education that highlight our shared evolutionary story. Since 2002, she and her husband (Rev. Michael Dowd) have lived entirely on the road as “America’s evolutionary evangelists” — which is the title of the couple’s occasional podcast. Barlow and Dowd also interview guests on their shared series, Inspiring Naturalism Podcast, and both are on the advisory board of the Religious Naturalist Association (created in 2014).
No longer writing science books, Barlow now creates videos on evolutionary themes (and, since 2012, also on climate change), which she posts on her youtube channel, “ghostsofevolution”.