Female environmentalist and author Michelle Schuman to appear at Cafe Zoë on August 8

Female environmentalist and author Michelle Schuman will appear at Cafe Zoë (1929 Menalto Ave.) on Monday, August 8 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm to talk about her book The Understory, discussing ways that small communities can make a difference in the efforts to reverse the adverse effects of climate change.

Passion and peril are intertwined in The Understudy, a true tale of a bright young woman, driven to make the natural world a better place, while hindered not by physical challenges, but by human adversaries and predators. Michelle Schuman learns that her life and her work hang precariously in the balance. She experiences the ways in which greed and ambition so easily place humanity and the environment in jeopardy.

A short time after arriving in Alaska with her husband, he is tragically killed, leaving her with nothing to lose, propelling her on a tumultuous journey into the darkness of humanity, lies, fraud, and deceit that underlie the sad travesties of overhunting animals, trampling native communities, and desecrating the environment.

Michelle sees this environmental desecration firsthand in 1989 in her role as an Oil Spill and Hazardous Waste Ecologist for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC), which places her at ground zero for the environmental disaster known as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. Her drive to learn from the healing lessons of nature helps her endure the culture of intimidation and harassment that come with being a female environmentalist in the land of the midnight sun.