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A former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist, Courtney White dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to cofound the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists and others around practices that improve economic and ecological resilience in western working landscapes. He served as Executive Director of Quivira for nearly fifteen years before becoming its Creative Director.
In 2005, Wendell Berry included Courtney’s essay The Working Wilderness in his collection The Way of Ignorance, an endorsement that set Courtney on a literary path focused on solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. Michael Pollan wrote a Foreword to his book Grass, Soil, Hope. Courtney's nonfiction writing has covered land health, local food, grassfed meat, soil carbon, the radical center, and regenerative agriculture. In 2016, he left Quivira to concentrate full time on writing, including fiction.
Born in Philadelphia, Courtney grew up in Phoenix, earned a B.A. from Reed College and attended UCLA’s graduate school in filmmaking. He worked as an archaeologist for Arizona State University and the National Park Service. He moved to Santa Fe, NM, in 1992 – the same year that Wallace Stegner wrote a Foreword to his photography book The Indelible West.
He is the author of Revolution on the Range (Island Press), Grass, Soil, Hope (Chelsea Green), The Age of Consequences (Counterpoint Press) and 2% Solutions for the Planet (Chelsea Green). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
