Maura Stephens

Maura Stephens is a professional independent journalist, investigator, editor, educator, organic / regenerative farmer, theater artist, herbalist, and multi-issue activist. In recent years she has focused on issues relating to human and Nature rights, environmental and social justice, peace, climate change, regenerative resilience, human migration, food security/sovereignty, conflict transformation, media literacy, and access to independent media.

 

One of her earliest jobs was with the National Urban League, where she learned from Black friends, bosses, and

colleagues about civil rights struggles and the endemic racist (as well as misogynist and patriarchal) economic,
political, and social systems that made participating in them an ongoing imperative in all her future endeavors.

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  Maura has founded or cofounded several grassroots organizations and projects
   devoted to peace, human rights, and holistic ecological practices, among
    them Iraqi Refugees Assistance Connection, International Campaign for
Freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma, FrackbustersNY, Coalition to Protect
New York, and You Are Here fossil-fuel infrastructure map. She has stood in
solidarity with people resisting fossil fuel extraction and infrastructures in ten U.S.
states, two Canadian provinces, and the Standing Rock Sioux Nation.

 

Maura spent many years farming, growing or trading with neighbors for almost all of her family’s food
and now grows medicines and crops to heal and nurture others as well as her own household. In the
late 1980s she used her lifelong "campesina" knowledge as a member of the inaugural team of
Bronx Green-Up, which would become a model for urban gardening nationwide in the USA. Learning
from neighborhood residents what kind of green space they wanted, the BGU team then worked with
the communities to reclaim dangerous, unhealthy, trashed lots and turn them into oases that
provided food, beauty, and tranquility.

 

After university, where she majored in creative writing and theater arts, Maura worked in New York as a professional actor, with a few small successes in off-off and off-Broadway houses (and one never-released film). She promised herself she'd spend five years and if she was unable to make a living in that pursuit, she'd try something else. Near the end of that time, still tending bar and working in catering, she "fell into" an editorial job that would change the course of her future, at Newsweek magazine, then a respected news organization.

She learned the craft of journalism and a lot more about injustice during the next 19 years at Newsweek and Newsweek International in various roles: editorial assistant, researcher, reporter, writer, and ultimately general editor responsible for four international editions’ weekly close. She worked on stories as far-ranging as the struggles against and eventual end of apartheid in South Africa, the AIDS crisis, the emigration of multinational companies from the USA and accompanying assault on labor ("RIFs" or "reductions in force" -- a corporate euphemism for this -- took place at Newsweek while she was there, harming many colleagues), the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Iran-Iraq War, the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103, German reunification, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,  the Rwandan genocide, the Zapatista uprising, and the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, among many others. During her time there the magazine had grown steadily more and more corporate and far from the ideal of independent, unbiased journalism with which she had fallen in love. She left Newsweek, for the third and final time (those stories will have to wait for another time), and corporate-controlled media in 1997. 

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She subsequently went on to establish a successful early internet ’zine with a partner, then to edit and publish ICView, a university magazine, and to champion independent media at the Park Center for Independent Media, helping community media outlets and young

journalists with a passion for baring truths with a bias for people and planet, not for corporate profit. She was fortunate to be able to teach independent journalism at Ithaca College and in communities across the USA via workshops. She later taught indy journalism to international students at la Universidad para la Paz, the UN-mandated university, for a short but rewarding time.

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Maura has been published, both bylined and un-bylined, in many independent news media, including Common Dreams, openDemocracy, Organic Gardening/Organic Style, System Change Not Climate Change, TruthOut, and Yes! magazine. She is the author of countless white papers, book chapters, short stories, poems, essays, and several legally binding resolutions and bills, and is currently working on two nonfiction books. She also edits fiction, nonfiction, and environmental books, with titles including Shamrocks and Oil Slicks: A People’s Uprising against Shell Oil in Mayo County, Ireland by Fred A. Wilcox and Florida Lost and Found: Nature in the Changing Landscape by Fran Palmeri.

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She returned to theater in 1999 as an actor and director onstage and now, mostly, on Zoom. She has written one full-length and
several short plays and serves as a dramaturg for playwrights. Lately she has been committing time and talent to a troupe of
mature folks, Drama With Friends, which offers free online performances monthly, as well as New York-based and UK-based groups.

 

In 2014 Maura was invited to give a presentation during the weekend of the People's Climate March in New York City -- part of the world's biggest climate demonstration, with people in cities globally demanding that their governments change course and institute binding policies in response to our worsening climate chaos (alas, those policies have not only not been implemented, in many cases reasonable policies

have been reversed). It was during this time that the North American ecosocialist network
System Change Not Climate Change was formed. Maura would discover SCNCC during the early months of Covid lockdown in 2020, and has been working with the network ever since, as a coordinating committee member, editor, writer, webinar cohost, and strategist.

 

Having been introduced to the global Ecoversities Alliance during the 2021 and 2022 Re-imagining Education Conferences, she joined the alliance and is as a member of its conflict transformation and other service circles. Ecoversities seeks to "radically re-imagine education to cultivate human and ecological flourishing." It has been a rich and rewarding experience to learn, co-learn, and un-learn along with people from many cultures and perspectives around Earth.

A citizen of the United States and the Republic of Ireland, she’s fluent in her native English and conversant in Spanish.