Claire Seda
Writer ⭑ Naturalist ⭑ Environmentalist
Awe in Nature
As a naturalist & environmentalist, Claire cultivates awe and inspiration in the small, ignored, and reviled. Find your own #tinyawe and test your poison oak ID chops by connecting with her on her Instagram account, the Poison Oak Appreciation Society.
Poison Oak & Other Writing
Claire’s current project is a natural history of poison oak. Join the newsletter to hear updates, get articles on the environment, climate, natural history, and migration health, and learn about upcoming events.
Articles
Claire is a communications executive and award-winning professional writer. In addition to thousands of digital articles, she has published in-print articles, ghostwritten op-eds, peer-reviewed journal articles, a textbook chapter, and much more. Access a few recent examples here.
How people feel connection with the world around them determines everything else: what they value, where they place their attention, and how they will face the bewilderment and stress of our collective chronic uncertainty. My career as a writer, naturalist, and communications executive is built on helping people feel grounded, connected, and ready to act.
My writing centers on natural history, place-based philosophy, and the concept and cultivation of Awe Ecology: the study of attention, curiosity, and wonder, not just from “big awe” like sunsets and fireworks, but the “tiny awe” – everyday, overlooked, even reviled sources of awe we find in the environment around us. These moments of awe unfurl our connection to the natural world, deepen our empathy, reshape our values and motivations, and ultimately change our actions. My current project, a natural history of poison oak, explores these themes.
In my executive work, I lead communication strategies that tackle the biggest of the big: climate change, health injustice, environmental degradation, and their intersections. The same framework that shapes my writing drives my executive work. I help people transcend their everyday understanding of the world, to feel in their bodies their personal connection to solutions so that action becomes the natural next step.