Christopher Childs

Christopher Childs is the author of _The Spirit’s Terrain: Creativity, Activism, and Transformation_, published by Beacon Press in 1998 with a Foreword by the Dalai Lama. Publisher’s Weekly called the book a “spiritual manifesto for modern-day social-environmental activists,” and Bill Moyers praised it as “a very powerful insight that has significance for journalism as well as activism”. Childs is also the editor of Penmaen Press’s 1978 _Clear Sky, Pure Light: Encounters with Henry David Thoreau_, an unusual anthology containing the source material of his earlier-created “stage portrait” of Thoreau; the book was praised by the Thoreau Journal Quarterly as perhaps “the perfect introduction to the master”.

Childs served as activist and award-winning National Speaker for the U.S. branch of Greenpeace between 1987-96, and was one of the first speakers crisscrossing the country warning of the risks of carbon emissions, a destabilized climate, and global heating. While with Greenpeace, he was named Lecturer of the Year by the National Association for Campus Activities, chosen from among finalists who included Maya Angelou. He also served Greenpeace as an activist for clean, alternative energy and clean industrial production -- and, in the process of demonstrating (peacefully) for those causes, he garnered arrests in four states, and in the District of Columbia at the gates of the Bush (41) White House. (On the occasion of his first arrest -- with two colleagues, near Love Canal -- a New York State judge examined them from the bench and then declared, "You're the people from Greenpeace. I like what you do.")

Childs has since served as both Conservation Chair and Energy Chair for the Sierra Club’s North Star Chapter; also a former boardmember and Advocacy Committee Chair of the Minnesota Renewable Energy Society, he helped to formulate policy, and to shape legislation and issue response, both for MRES and -- regionally and nationally -- for the Sierra Club. Honors he has received include three North Star Chapter awards for volunteer leadership.

In 2004, Childs created the Club's "Walk for Wind," which promoted wind power across Minnesota and was reprised in 2006. With his wife, well-known activist and former Green Party-endorsed St. Paul mayoral candidate Elizabeth Dickinson, he lives on St. Paul's West Side in a 1911 house that gets its primary electricity from a 3-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system; their largely self-renovated home has twice been on the Minneapolis-St. Paul Home Tour, and four times on the American Solar Energy Society's national Solar Tour.

An actor as well as author and activist, his credits extend from several roles on PBS’ American Playhouse (most notably as the misguided Rev. Nicholas Noyes in the Salem witch trial re-creation _Three Sovereigns for Sarah_, starring Vanessa Redgrave), to an appearance in Henry Fonda's last film -- the ABC-TV movie _Summer Solstice_ -- to national tours of his original one-man “stage portrait,” _Clear Sky, Pure Light: an Evening with Henry David Thoreau_... last performed by request of the Walden Woods Project/Thoreau Institute as part of their 2017 celebration of Thoreau’s bicentennial.

Childs found only minimal time for acting, however, once he became seriously involved in environmental activism in the mid-1980s. In the years after his decade with Greenpeace, in addition to his volunteer efforts with the Sierra Club, he served as communications director for two high-profile Minnesota political campaigns: that of his wife for St. Paul Mayor in 2005; and the 2002 Green Party gubernatorial campaign of his former Greenpeace colleague Ken Pentel, at a time when the Greens were officially a major party in the state.

Now largely retired, he occasionally does speaking engagements on creativity, on the environment, or on the cause of the Tibetan people -- particularly close to his heart since a trip to Tibet, northern Nepal, and Dharamsala, India, at the turn of the millennium that included a border trek with the board of the aid group Nepal SEEDS. He has been working by turns on a memoir of his years with Greenpeace; on his nearly fulltime hobby, genealogy; and on a novel set in Tibet between the Chinese invasion of 1950 and the present day.