Bio

Anne Louise Burdett is a marine conservation scientist, agroecologist, clinical herbalist, and educator. Much of her career has been geared towards community organizing around food and health justice, sustainable agriculture and community. She is now bridging her terrestrial work with marine science. Anne Louise is interested in working at the amphibious edges of land and sea, at the intersection of anthropogenic impact and changing ecosystems and their vulnerabilities. Currently, her work is focused on climate change adaptation and resilience, seascape restoration and endangered species protection. She works primarily in conservation projects focused on seagrass, corals, mangroves and seaweed, as well as alternative livelihoods in coastal communities. Her approach is through a lens of mutual aid, scientific literacy, and outright wonder.

Climate Science

Currently, Anne Louise works for The Ocean Foundation (TOF), primarily on the Blue Resilience Initiative (BRI) based in various sites around the Caribbean."The Blue Resilience Initiative works to support coastal community resilience by restoring and conserving coastal habitats like seagrasses, mangroves, coral reefs, seaweeds, and salt marshes. We also reduce stressors to coastal environments and improve local food security through innovative regenerative agriculture and agroforestry approaches using seaweed-based compost." TOFThe Caribbean is one of the most vulnerable areas on the planet to climate change. Through capacity building, peer-to-peer training and locally directed restoration efforts, we are collaboratively building resilience and adaptive measures towards climate change in some of the most climate-impacted communities worldwide.

• The Ocean Foundation

Botanical Medicine

Anne Louise believes wholeheartedly in being true to oneself, acting from authentic desire, and in individual wellness being essentially and always tied to collective wellness. She has run a botanical medicine clinic since 2012 as well as an intensive clinical training program. Anne Louise is trained in western constitutional herbalism, somatic trauma counseling, sexual and reproductive health, and in childbirth education. Currently she sells bulk herbal tinctures and offers a limited number of consultations.Please inquire for availability and a price list for plant medicines.

Dirt Gems

Dirt Gems is a plant oracle deck and guidebook designed to invite you into a more personal and subtle relationship with the plant world. It is a practice of listening and observation. Creating relationships with the nonhuman world requires that we slow down, decenter ourselves, and learn from the intelligence of the silken spider web, the humming saltmarsh, carnivorous bog plants, and desert superblooms. Our world is changing rapidly and in unexpected ways. This project is designed to stir the memories of what it felt like to know that we are nature. If we can find our way back to understanding our role in this greater ecology, we can find our way forward.This project contains 65 beautiful plant paintings, with a guidebook containing full descriptions of each plant, instructions on how to use the deck and the suits where they are grouped. This is a wellspring, it is a deep clear pool to dive into, emerging with your own beloved understanding of what these plants can mean to you, your life, and the greater community. This project is an invitation to come back, to the source, to where we have always belonged and towards where we must orient ourselves for a hopeful and bright future; forest, swamp, mountain, ocean.Let us not watch species disappear, fragile ecosystems unravel, and unprecedented change and let the sweeping apathy or despair rush in. We are here, the time is now. There is much work to be done, and it starts with each day, quieting down and learning from what has come before us and will surely outlive us. Let us follow the guidance of our plant allies, of the honeybee, singing frogs, seedheads bending the long stem. Let us be present and remember what we truly need, what is important and what is worth fighting for. This is the most important thing we can do.

• The Dirt Gems

Art & Performance

Anne Louise is also a dancer and performer with works focused on land-based storytelling, stewardship, and play. Her work usually centers around the body, our subtle and complex relationships with one another, landscape, waterscapes and the distance between longing and belonging. She has participated in artist residencies in Chile, Brazil and Cuba, each involving intense training with a final performance for the public. She has been a core member of The Royal Frog Ballet for fifteen years. She is trained in various forms of dance and improvisation as well as music composition. Anne Louise believes that art in all its forms has the potential to not only keep us awake and alive as a species, but towards powerful transformation into building new worlds.For more information on her work or for collaborations, please email.

• The Royal Frog Ballet