Alice Melendez

I was born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Clay City and the rolling fields of central Kentucky. I grew up on the farm, went to small town schools, learned to drive on winding country roads with lots of blind spots. I went away, like a lot of people, and came back. “Away” took me to Dartmouth College, to Philadelphia, and then six or so years in Houston. I studied the way that economies and social agreements and hard physical realities interplay in real actual places (not models). I worked at a delivery business and at a refugee resettlement agency. I ran a handyman business and for a short while a grain elevator. I thought for a while that 'the climate movement' might generate political will for a massive transformation in the way that humans relate to the natural world, and I worked on that. Now, I think it's time to focus on regenerative agriculture in our Ohio River Valley to ride through whatever comes our way.