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Carolyn M. Finney, storyteller, actress, columnist, environmental advocate, and geographer who focuses on cultural awareness, competency, race, gender, and the environment, was born in 1959, adopted when she was six months old, and reared on a 12-acre estate owned by a wealthy, Jewish family in Mamaroneck, New York by an African American couple Henry L. Finney and Rose E. Finney who were the caretakers. Because of the adoption laws of New York State, Finney never obtained information regarding her biological parents as they, too, were Black. She has two brothers, Gregory Finney and John Finney. All of them attended the Mamaroneck public schools.
Finney, who did theater in the 1980s in New York City and Los Angeles, also put her academic training on hold for a decade while she traveled throughout East Africa and South Asia. She then traveled across the United States interviewing Black people about their relationship to the environment and especially land and how that was impacted by race. She gathered these stories because she felt they were not adequately represented in the environmental movement.
In 1990, Finney began serving as Senior Government Relations Manager for the Environmental Industries Association of America first in Massachusetts and then in Washington, D.C. She received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Fairhaven College in Bellingham, Washington in 1999. In 2001 while enrolled at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, she received a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Nepal on Nepalese women and the environment. In 2003, she became a Canon National Parks Science Scholar Fellow. Finney earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Geography from Clark in 2006. Her dissertation was Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.
From 2007 to 2023, Finney was self-employed as a Mediator Client Relations Manager in Washington,. D.C. During this period, she also produced ten books including Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, (2014) a seminal work that highlighted the underrepresentation of African Americans in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism.
Since 2019, Finney has been a storyteller and scholar-in-residence at the Franklin Environmental Center, Middlebury College, an instructor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management at the University of California at Berkeley, and a faculty member at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
From 2021 to 2023, Finney was a columnist for the Earth Island Journal in Berkeley and penned twelve columns. In 2024, Dr. Carolyn M. Finney delivered the annual Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture, which honored Stokely’s passions regarding Appalachia, the environment, and racial and gender equity. The address was hosted by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries.
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“Carolyn Finney,” https://www.tpl.org/about/carolyn-finney;
Emily Herrington and Carolyn Finney, “Featured Interview: “Love Is Risk”
with Carolyn Finney,”https://godandnature.asa3.org/featured-interview-ldquolove-is-riskrdquo-with-carolyn-finney.html;
“There’s No Place Like Home: An Essay by Dr. Carolyn Finney,”https://joytripproject.com/2020/10/theres-no-place-like-home-an-essay-by-dr-carolyn-finney/.
Carolyn Finney “Whose Story Counts?” 2020 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i58ayzQf4wc
