Kristina Peterson

Kristina Peterson helped to create the Lowlander Center to address the complex social and environmental impacts of the climate crisis with the inclusion of local communities and their vast knowledges. "Think globally, act locally” for just and sustainable future is a guiding principle of her work. As an applied social scientist who has spent her life as a community activist for sustainable just communities mostly through long-term holistic community-based responses to disasters, she has helped create large scale networks of community/regional responses for large national disasters including technological-environmental, acts of racial violence, economic upheaval and weather events. Her years of justice work within the disaster mitigation field have contributed to the creation of and being a founding board member of both the National Hazards Mitigation Association and the Gender and Disaster Network. Her justice work includes multiple dimensions of safe, natural and built environments, holistic planning, adaptation and resettlement. She has been working on ways to address and decolonize outcomes from the Doctrine of Discovery through forms of restorative justice and, land stewardship, climate adaptation land trusts and the repatriation of land. Peterson is an advocate for a federally created Department on Climate Adaptation similar to the 1934 Resettlement Administration which would have cabinet status. Peterson is part of the Rising Voices, Changing Coast-National Science Foundation Coastlines and People program, and continuing dialogue with the United Nations rapporteur on internal displacement and justice.