Marianna has made a career of putting words, images, and ideas together in unconventional ways. A self-proclaimed environmentalist while also being the daughter of a lumberman, she learned early on that natural resources have different ecological, cultural, personal and economic value to different people and that it is possible to find enough common ground among those differences to work toward the good of the whole.
She has been a witness to and, in part, a catalyst for significant change: in the Passive Solar movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which changed the way we design buildings and communities for energy conservation; in the New Urbanist movement in the ‘90s which changed the paradigm of city, town and regional planning; in the 2000’s, bringing sustainability to the center of our cultural conversation in the built environment, land conservation and the business practices of corporate America; and today in the fight against climate change.
Real change takes time, but it can happen. Given the urgency and scale of the challenges we face in the world today, she feels a renewed purpose and new agency to accelerate change for good.