Alder Wheeler is a Master’s student in Forestry and a member of both the Critical Environmental Justice Lab and the Disabled Ecologies Lab. Their background spans botany, natural history education, and land stewardship, alongside deep experience in social services, community organizing, and collectives. Born and raised in the Tomales Bay Watershed, Alder is now returning to it to organize affinity-based stewardship programs for people historically excluded from natural resource management. Through these workshops and retreats, they work to collectively reimagine stewardship education and practice—centering horizontal pedagogy, participatory action research, and co-authorship as pathways toward stewardship praxis grounded in solidarity, indispensability, and care.
Alder is interested in feminist science and technology studies, queer and disabled ecologies, critical geographies and natural histories, Indigenous stewardship and co-stewardship, participatory methods, and horizontal pedagogical approaches
