Doctor Ellen Moore from Berkeley to Vietnam to Tacoma

Dr. Ellen Moore comes to us from the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her B.A. in Forensic Anthropology at UC-Berkeley where she found it "tame" compared with the accounts of political activism and protests on the campus in the sixties. There were "humongous," 800-student lower-level classes taught at Berkeley when she attended. She went on to the University of Tennessee for her M.A. in the same discipline. With the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign she received her Ph.D. in Communication. Professor Moore created a new class since she has been here at UWT, which is TCOM 310, about environmental issues in mainstream media.

Ellen enjoys hiking in the great outdoors. One of her favorite hikes around here is at Skookum Falls near Crystal Mountain. After suffering a knee injury skiing at age 25, she remains a bit concerned about being injured again while skiing. However, her partner is very much involved with the Crystal Mountain resort in its picturesque rugged niche high in the Cascades, so she joins him there despite any misgivings. Ellen Moore believes in living life as Eleanor Roosevelt said to: "Do one thing every day that scares you." Gliding down those slopes on skis provides that about thirty times a day for her.

Her best friend's name is Chewbacca. He weighs in at 200 pounds and slobbers profusely. As a shaggy St. Bernard with natural snow-rescue talents, he must be a great friend to have on the mountain.

Vietnam war

Dr. Moore spent part of her career as a forensic anthropologist working for the U.S. Dept. of Defense recovering remains from U.S. military aviation crash sites in Southeast Asia from 2000 to 2003. She was project leader, and the only civilian member of a military cohort which would spend as much as six weeks in the jungle to excavate aviation crash sites in search of soldiers that went "Missing in Action." Moore helped to recover dozens of identified remains which were then repatriated to U.S. soil and returned to their families.

Contending with rugged terrain, tigers, snakes and leeches like many Viet Nam vets did before her, Ellen managed to avoid lethal bites like that from the "Two Step" Snake (the Bamboo Pit Viper), so nick-named because of a persistent rumor that after its bite you walk only two more steps before dying.

Feeling the heat: global warming

In the newly refurbished, LEED certified JOY building on Dec. 7, Professor Moore lectured for the lunch-hour IAS course concerning messages children receive from mainstream movies about environmental issues. Some highlights of her in-depth analysis of the messages contained in the animated films "Ice Age 2" and "Wall-E" are: life is precious, global warming or pollution can destroy our world, and a lone hero can fix it all.

In the real world a lone cartoon hero will not suddenly heal our sick planet. The task will require the combined efforts of us all. Incredibly, manufacturing something as small as a laptop creates 4000 times its weight in trash. As the vast majorities (97%) of climate scientists warn, human-caused climate change is already upon us with more intense storms and melting glaciers.

The most recent measurements show that global carbon emissions have increased by 5.9% in just this past year alone. Source: http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Now/global-carbon-emissions.html, 2009-2010.