Meet the Natural Home team
Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Editor-in-Chief, Natural Home magazine
Author, The Wabi-Sabi House
Within our homes, all things essential to our health and happiness intersect. Within our homes, families grow, ideas are shared, the spirit is replenished. Within our homes, we illustrate to others who we are and remind ourselves of who we want to be.
That is why we seek to make our homes as healthy, harmonious, beautiful and environmentally sound as possible. But with the demands of our lives, our work and even the general maintenance of our houses, finding the time and focus to achieve the ideal home is often difficult.
Robyn Griggs Lawrence brings forth possibility in the realm of home through her work as editor-in-chief of Natural Home magazine (www.NaturalHomeMagazine.com), her book The Wabi-Sabi House (www.WabiSabiHouse.com), her speaking engagements and her frequent interaction with media.
A Boulder, Colo., resident, Lawrence is inspired by the dramatic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains as she sets the editorial tone for the popular lifestyle publication. Lawrence brings a unique understanding of living a natural lifestyle in an imperfect and often unnatural world. “I know from personal experience that living a natural lifestyle can be challenging given the real-life constraints of family, time and resources,” she says. “However, there are many solutions for living naturally that do not compromise health, convenience or sanity.”
Lawrence has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist. She joined Natural Home in 1999, after serving as editor of The Herb Companion and Mountain Living magazines. She has written and spoken on topics ranging from eco-building to spiritual design to organic gardening. Lawrence’s journalism career has included reporting and editing positions at The Chicago Tribune, Adweek and InformationWeek as well as credits in Cosmopolitan and the Boston Herald.
A passionate expert on developing living spaces that are light on the land, Lawrence has been featured in USA Today, on CNN’s “Open House,” national home and garden radio programs and several local TV and radio programs in top-tier markets nationwide.
Called “one of the best-informed advocates of natural living in America” by the Conservation Research Institute, Lawrence wants homeowners to know they “don’t need to spend a fortune to make their homes more environmentally sound. The idea is to slowly get more conscious and make better choices over time.”
Her 2004 book, the Wabi-Sabi House, introduced Americans to the 15th century Japanese Wabi-Sabi philosophy – a collective longing for simplicity, serenity and authenticity in one’s home. The New York Times, Time and the Chicago Tribune were among the several media nationwide who profiled her work.
Among her current projects with Natural Home: helping develop New York City’s first truly green home, a Brooklyn brownstone renovation that’s set for completion in October 2007.
Lawrence holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Iowa and has studied at the City University of London’s Graduate Centre for Journalism.
Jessica Kellner
Managing Editor, Natural Home magazine
Jessica Kellner is managing editor of Natural Home magazine. Committed to the values of making one’s home and lifestyle healthier and more environmentally sound, Kellner’s years of editorial work have given her a broad base of knowledge on practical, easy and inexpensive ways for anyone to go green.
Using her personal experiences combined with the wealth of knowledge stored in the 10 years of Natural Home magazines, Kellner’s education over the years makes it easy for her to relay information to others in a way that’s relatable, doable and fun. “I came onto the staff of Natural Home with a lot of interest in environmentalism and an earnest desire to become more eco-friendly in my day-to-day life,” Kellner says, “but I didn’t know that much about how to do it. After working for this magazine for several years, I am able to determine easy solutions that work for my lifestyle and the environment.”
Kellner’s blog topics often include tips from her daily life, such as ways she is working to make her rental townhouse more eco-friendly. As a young adult with a limited budget and the restrictions of not owning a home, Kellner understands how to make green living achievable to young people. “Once you get used to thinking about things through an environmental lens, it becomes easy to adjust your choices,” she says. “Now, it’s almost like a game to me. I am always thinking: what could I do to make this more eco-friendly? When I needed balcony furniture and bookshelves for my new space, I didn’t even think of buying new. By finding nice, used pieces, I helped the environment and saved money. That’s the ideal combination for me.”
A 2004 graduate of the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Kellner started with Ogden Publications in October of 2004 as editorial assistant for The Herb Companion and Herbs for Health magazines. She was named coordinating editor of Natural Home when Ogden acquired the title in 2005 and became managing editor in January 2008. Kellner’s duties include working with freelance writers and photographers, writing and editing feature articles, managing the Natural Home website, overseeing the Natural Home internship program and managing on-site staff.
Kim Wallace
Assistant Editor, Natural Home magazine
Kim Wallace grew up green without really knowing it.
Raised in the South, Wallace enjoyed eating home-grown vegetables from her parents’ backyard garden and helped her mom can vegetables every season. She raked leaves and gathered food scraps for compost, not thinking anything of it at the time.
What she did just 10 years ago as a child has now become a major lifestyle trend among big and small city dwellers nationwide.
Though she doesn’t possess that same green thumb or talent for canning now, Wallace does have an interest in taking care of the skin she’s in as well as the planet she’s on. “I’ve always tried to find the best stuff out there to take care of myself,” she says. “Now, my search is getting easier with the onset of natural products that are easier on me and the environment.” Wallace is constantly on the lookout for new products to review and introduce to Natural Home readers, and she’s also on the hunt for easy-to-grow windowsill herbs and plants for her small apartment.
A Fort Smith, Ark., native, Wallace currently lives in Lawrence, Kan., where she enjoys scouting eco-friendly beauty products, discovering fresh foods at the community mercantile and sampling fair trade, organic chocolate. “Working at Natural Home combined with living in a city that is really committed to the environmental movement has really helped fine-tune my way of thinking when it comes to greening my every day life,” she says. In the past, Wallace has worked on grassroots efforts with the East Lawrence Neighborhood Association, Rosedale Middle School in Kansas City, Kan., and has been a guest speaker at the Arkansas Scholastic Press Association.
Wallace is a 2008 graduate of the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She became the assistant editor in January 2008 after completing a four-month internship at Natural Home, as well as at sister titles The Herb Companion and Herbs for Health. Wallace writes and edits new product spots and feature stories, maintains the Natural Home website, researches and tracks green trends, blogs about natural beauty products, processes contracts and invoices, and manages the Natural Home MySpace page (http://www.MySpace.com/NaturalHome).
Amy Mayfield
Contributing Editor, Natural Home magazine
Amy Mayfield, former editor of Herbs for Health magazine and senior editor of The Herb Companion magazine, is a contributing editor for Natural Home. She lives in beautiful, green Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband and two young children.
Mayfield and her family live in a small 1922 home in a designated historic district near Oregon State University. The family tries to make the best environmental choices possible, enjoying bike riding, gardening, community-supported agriculture involvement, car-free days, local eating, driving a hybrid vehicle and buying used whenever possible.
Mayfield’s husband, Ryan, is an engineer who designs commercial-scale solar electric systems. Although their roof is significantly shaded by a neighbor’s sequoia, the Mayfields are planning to install a 2-KW photovoltaic system on their home that will offset approximately 30 percent of their energy use.
Mayfield, a native of Santa Cruz, California, graduated cum laude from Humboldt State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in news-editorial journalism in 1999. In her spare moments away from work and kids, she enjoys cooking, reading, thrift store shopping and attending Jazzercise classes.
Tabitha Alterman
Technical Editor, Natural Home magazine
Tabitha Alterman has maintained a lifelong interest in living lightly on the planet while soaking up all its glory, through both work and play. She revels in fresh air and sunshine, music with a soul, dancing from the hips, long bouts of travel, celebrating the seasons through cooking and — above all — good times with the good people she holds near and dear. She values wit and beauty, but neither above compassion. Her favorite words are bunk, sagacious and smarmy.
Since the age of 10, she’s been filling notebooks with sketches and plans for an eventual “Tabitopia,” where natural building methods and excellent homegrown food are key elements. She’s inspired by the principles of wabi sabi she’s learned from Natural Home’s editor-in-chief, and is thrilled to be on board as the team’s technical editor. She is proud that her work for the magazine contributes to well-researched, thoughtful content that is as free from greenwashing as possible.
Alterman currently serves as a civil society delegate to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, where her focus is on sustainable agriculture. And she’s lucky enough to be paying the majority of her bills with a fun and challenging post as senior editor over at our sister magazine, Mother Earth News.
Alterman studied English literature at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., aka The Natural State, where she misses the pecan grove and Petit Jean Mountain the most. She has also lived under the grey skies and shimmering spires of Oxford, England; the massive magnolias and wraparound porches of her hometown of Memphis, Tenn.; on the side of a volcano in Hawaii’s Kona Coast; in a bungalow in hip Lawrence, Kan.; in the shadow of South Mountain in Phoenix, Ariz.; and in her friendly-family-filled neighborhood of West Harlem in New York City. Alterman is a recent transplant to New York, where she is delighted to have given up driving altogether, and is pursuing graduate studies in sustainable food systems research. She owes her dedication to conscientious living to the fabulous example set by her parents, who tread lightly on a rural patch of the last remaining tallgrass prairie in the United States.
Andrew Humphrey
Copy Editor, Natural Home magazine
Editorial Advisory Board
Edith Vanderbilt Cecil is a "green" interior designer and also holds several important business and philanthropic positions. She is the director of Concurrent Technologies Corporation's International Environmental Projects, founder and executive director of the United States Environmental Training Institute, a group that promotes positive environmental change within industry by fostering appropriate environmental technologies and management approaches.
Debra Lynn Dadd is the author of six consumer guidebooks that have been a leading influence in the green consumer market for more than a decade. Called "the queen of green" by The New York Times, Debra is the author of Nontoxic & Natural; The Nontoxic Home; Natural & Earthwise; The Nontoxic Home & Office; Sustaining the Earth; and Home, Safe Home. She has made numerous appearances on national radio and television programs, including National Public Radio, CNN, and the Today show.
Brian Dunbar, IDEC, NCIDQ, Associate AIA, is director of the Institute for the built Environment and associate professor of interior design at Colorado State University. Brian has compiled in-depth research on sustainable design, healthy buildings, the innovative design process, and design theory as well as research for the American Institute of Architects and the U.S. National Park Service. He is a member of the AIA's Interiors Committee and the Committee on the Environment, the Interior Design Educators Council, the Design Communications Association, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
David Eisenberg is the founder and director of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology in Tucson, Arizona, an organization that supports the development and use of sustainable approaches to meeting human and ecological needs through appropriate use of technology. The co-author of The Straw Bale House, the book that introduced Americans to straw bale building, he has helped build homes of rammed earth and adobe as well as the spaceframe and glazing systems for Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. He has led straw bale workshops throughout the world and consults on design and construction details and code issues, as well as research and testing projects for straw bale construction.
Steven Foster is president of Steven Foster Group, a worldwide information resource for the medicinal and aromatic plant industries. Steven has served as a renowned medicinal and aromatic plant specialist, commercial consultant, and lecturer. He is the author of twelve publications, including 101 Medicinal Herbs.
David Johnston is president of What's Working, an international environmental design and consulting firm in Boulder, Colorado, that specializes in environmental construction technology. Co-author of the Denver Metro Home Builder's Association Green Builder Certification Program, David also has developed green builder programs for the cities of Boulder and Aspen in Colorado, the city of Los Angeles, and the East Bay area of San Francisco. His firm developed a marketing strategy for the U.S. Green Building Council to introduce the nation's first commercial building environmental rating system--Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)--and was selected to represent the United States at International Energy Agency meetings to develop international research on sustainable building. He is the author of Building Green in a Black and White World.
David Pearson is the author of The Natural House Book, published in 1989, which was one of the first books to introduce mainstream audiences to natural building. A promoter of Gaian thinking ("everything we do affects the health of the whole planet"), Pearson's mission is to prove to designers-and homeowners-that bearing a greater responsibility to ensure the future of the earth is a privilege, not a burden. David's work focuses on three touchstones that buildings of the future need to integrate: environmental awareness, the use of healthy, non-toxic, and sustainable materials, and a deeper understanding of the spiritual side of the home. He has also written Earth to Spirit: In Search of Natural Architecture and several books on sustainable design for Chelsea Green.
Sarah Susanka is an advocate of "less is more" in residential architecture and interior design. Susanka has emerged as one of America's favorite home architects. As a result of the success of The Not So Big House and the new vision it holds for the American home, she was featured by U.S. News and World Report as one of 18 innovators in American culture. Susanka has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Charlie Rose Show, and numerous radio shows around the country. She is a former principal and founding partner of the firm chosen by LIFE magazine to design its 1999 Dream Home.
Carol Venolia's now-defunct newsletter, Building with Nature, was one of the first in the field and developed an extremely loyal following during its lifetime. (Many of those subscribers have now been brought into the Natural Home fold.) The author of Healing Environments: Your Guide to Indoor Well-Being, Carol is an architect and consultant who has also been a pioneer in the green building movement.
Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori are the co-directors of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a think tank in Austin, Texas, that has pioneered green building. Pliny founded CMPBS in 1975 (he's truly the Daddy-O of this movement), and he and Gail have since created a veritable church for the green movement. Pliny and Gail are working with the Department of Energy's Building America program and with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop software that helps builders and homeowners determine the impacts of the building materials they choose.