Tara Cullis

Writer, President and Co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation

On completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Tara joined the faculty of Harvard University teaching non-fiction writing.  After five years she had in her spare time become a key player in efforts to protect the Amazon, and had worked extensively on Colombia’s Choco, British Columbia’s rainforests, and on struggles in Malaysia and northern Japan. She therefore put her academic career on hold to enter full-time environmental work in support of indigenous efforts.

She founded or co-founded nine organizations before starting the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990.  She was soon instrumental in the protection of a forest totaling 28.4 million acres in the lower Amazon -- “by far the planet's largest block of tropical forest protected by a single indigenous group”. She was a founder of the Turning Point Initiative of Coastal First Nations in BC (now known as the Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative) which links the First Nations of the Central and North Coast of British Columbia into an historic alliance, protecting the ecology of the region known as the Great Bear Rainforest.  Dr. Cullis has been adopted and named by the Haida, the Gitga’at, the Heiltsuk and the Nam’gis First Nations in BC, and has a special relationship with the Kayapo of the Xingu Valley in Brazil.