create a global impact.
Our mission is to change the field of freelance environmental education to make it a sustainable career choice. By fostering an understanding of how freelance educators work in their communities, we are able to bring attention to the depth, breadth, and knowledge of those working in this capacity.
THE talaterra global INITIATIVE
Independent environmental education professionals engage with their communities by moving through them and having thoughtful conversations with the public.
Talaterra’s mission is simple.
Bring attention to independent environmental education (EE) professionals who contribute to lifelong learning in communities. Create space for these professionals to have honest conversations and move their initiatives forward. Introduce EE professionals to new partners. Help make environmental education a sustainable career.
Through its initiatives, Talaterra facilitates career-strengthening and partnership-building opportunities for environmental professionals. It also helps them navigate career transitions involving environmental work in other sectors. This is an untapped workforce. It’s time to consider them and the experience they bring to other sectors.
ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
Share the podcast and the Transferable Solutions newsletter with others interested in environmentally-focused cross-sector work.
Photo: John DeMato, DeMato Productions
MEET TANiA MARIEN, Founder of talaterra
Tania Marien is an independent environmental education professional with over 20 years of experience connecting educators and raising awareness of the work of freelance professionals. She is the publisher of Transferable Solutions, a newsletter that reimagines environmental skills. The newsletter's objective is to help environmental educators apply their skills to cross-sector work.
Tania is the producer of the TALATERRA podcast, where she hosts conversations with independent environmental education and sustainability professionals, researchers, and authors. Past roles include serving as the founding editor of a newsletter about botanical art in Southern California and as the publisher of ArtPlantae, a resource connecting artists, naturalists, and educators, where she also worked as a full-time educator, editor, and bookseller. Tania is a contributor to The Carbon Almanac (Penguin Random House, 2022), The Carbon Almanac Podcast Network, and Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions (Springer Nature, 2024).
She wrote about her freelance project in Legacy, the national magazine of the National Association for Interpretation (download). She has held roundtables on freelancing in environmental education at the conferences of the Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education and the North American Association for Environmental Education. She has also presented at the National Association for Interpretation's annual conference.
View Tania's professional history here.
ABOUT TALATERRA
TALATERRA combines tala (Icelandic for “to speak” and “to talk”) with terra (Earth)—because speaking for our planet and telling its stories is what environmental educators do.
TALATERRA: to speak Earth.