Kathleen Dean Moore

In 2011, Moore and her colleague Michael P. Nelson published Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, which gathered the testimony of dozens of the world's moral leaders about our obligation to future generations. This was the first of many of Moore's articles, blogs, op-eds, and public talks in which she speaks out against those who would "wreck the world" through fossil fuel extraction and other acts that lead to global extinction. Her most recent climate ethics book is Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change. Moore now travels and speaks widely about the moral urgency of climate action. Her forthcoming book, Piano Tide, is her first novel, telling the story of an Alaskan tidewater town's defense of their freshwater. Her most recent work is a collaboration with the concert pianist, Rachelle McCabe, to bring music to her messages about global extinction. Moore has served on the board of directors of the Orion Society and the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.

Moore was raised in Berea, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. In 1969, she graduated with a B.A. in philosophy and French from Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio. From the University of Colorado Boulder, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy and studied in the Fleming School of Law. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she taught philosophy of law, critical thinking, and environmental philosophy. There, she served as department chair, Master Teacher, and Distinguished Professor, developing field courses such as the Philosophy of Nature, which she taught in the lake country of the Pacific Cascades. During that time, Moore co-founded, with poet and philanthropist Franz Dolp, the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, which she directed for 10 years. As director, she co-founded an ancillary program, the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Project at the H.J. Andrews Forest, in the Oregon Cascades. Long interested in interdisciplinary environmental education, Moore designed Oregon State's Master of Arts in Environmental Arts and Humanities. But her growing concern for the perils of global warming led her to leave the university in 2013 to devote all her time to writing and speaking about the moral urgency of climate action.

Kathleen Dean Moore (born 1947, Berea, Ohio) is a philosopher, writer, and environmental activist from Oregon State University. Her early creative nonfiction writing focused on the cultural and spiritual values of the natural world, especially shorelines and islands. Her more recent work is about the moral issues of climate change.