Candace Thompson
2023-2024 FIC Researcher
Candace Thompson (all pronouns accepted) is a (human) land steward and media maker who collaborates with soil, plants, microbes, fungi, animals, food, land, computers and other human beings in the search for mutualism in the face of the ongoing climate crisis Their project, The Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet (C.U.R.B.) uses citizen science, non-human storytelling and foraged community meals to unpack the complexities of edible urban ecosystems and imagine a future where the streets are 'clean enough to eat off of'. They also manage Solar 1's Stuy Cove Park, a newly redesigned public greenspace that uses systems thinking to render legible the intersecting issues of climate chaos, urban ecology, and (human) quality of life. Formerly a community food forest built atop a capped brownfield, the park has since been razed and redesigned as part of the city’s “Big U” project, which seeks to protect the residents of lower Manhattan from coastal flooding due to anthropogenic sea level rise.