Join us for an author talk with Wendy Johnson to discuss her new release (Jul 2025) Kinship Medicine. Dr. Johnson will be in conversation with Keya Chatterjee, former executive director of the US Climate Action Network and current executive director of Free DC.
About the book
For fans of Braiding Sweetgrass, The Future We Choose, and The Blue Zones, a book about the effect our relationship to nature has on our well-being and health.
Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective well-being.
The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare—are relational, with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson will show you how:
We must incorporate an “ecosystem” perspective into modern medicine
What you ingest and where you live can reinforce or upset your body’s delicate balance
Eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all the others
Histories of trauma can be passed down for generations
Rekindling our relationships to non-human life is essential to our well-being
Being closer to death can release some of its power over us
Actions of communities will be stronger and more lasting than any individual efforts
You will leave with a clear vision of what a new society might look like, methods to accomplish this transformation, and concrete examples of where it is being done successfully.
About the author
Dr. Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist, and writer who has spent her life actively working for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department, and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a Master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues both locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.