Dr. Heidi Steltzer

Scientist, Theologian and Mystic
Founder | Center for Earth Theology

Let’s Fall in Love with Our World Again

Dr. Heidi Steltzer has been studying ecosystem health in High Mountain and Arctic regions for 30+ years to understand the Earth and our relationship with our planet, which led her on a journey she never expected or even knew was possible. She’s a biogeotheologian, though not the first, and perhaps it is not often spoken of this way. Many have ventured on this path of planet as guide into relationship with Source, the Divine, and possibility.

Heidi is an experienced researcher, educator, communicator and guide for immersive experiences and dialogue. Heidi is American, European-born and raised in the U.S. and of Baltic and Bohemian ancestry. She served as a lead author on the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on the Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. She testified before the U.S. Congress on the Climate Crisis and offered briefings to the United Nations and the press on the scientific understanding about climate change and what can be next - next for us and for our world.

She’s been interviewed for articles and podcasts with the New York Times, Inside Climate News, The Colorado Sun, Awakening Lands, Discern Earth, Women’s Media Center and many more. Heidi has offered talks to diverse audiences in venues small and large, including the Institute of Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the French Embassy in NYC for the Albertine Festival, Designing Impact, and the Women Outside Adventure Forum. But, climate change is not why Heidi began to study biological systems and their ecological functions.

Heidi couldn’t not study the Earth. From a young age, she was inclined to journey into her backyard in rural Massachusetts to wander the forest and sit by the stream. As a first year college student at Duke University, she decided that to be a biologist one needs to know how to camp and enrolled in an experiential education program offered there that provided the opportunity to winter camp in the mountains of North Carolina. Most biologists do not camp. They do not immerse themselves into the sea, the land, or the meadows and forests they are studying, but this is what camping and residing at field stations offered to Heidi - full immersion, time alone in the wild, and facing her fears about what could happen. Facing fear is an essential skill for life and our world at this moment in history. Can we allow for the unknown? Can we welcome all that is possible?

Field science comes with a lot of risks that if we allow for them are a path to a much greater understanding of the Earth and our role as humans. Though often we may not realize it, we are being guided. The Earth guided Heidi to the places and times when she collected data. Not always, but often. Fitting these stories of Earth-guided wisdom into the format of modern science is tough, but important. Heidi’s published in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, and disciplinary journals in ecology and the biogeosciences. She’s presented at scientific conferences and in community settings small and large, near her home in Durango Colorado and lands and seas far away, including China and Antarctica. But much of what she’s experienced and learned has yet to be shared, because it challenges us to be more open as a society. Ideas about planetary possibility and wonder.

Heidi is a storyteller and mystic who blends the experience of how she knows through relationship with the land and with each audience into an immersive experience for the listeners. Through this, Heidi offers something different from traditional talks and desires connection with people before and after speaking events. Time to storytell is meant to be followed by engagement and listening to all that emerges. This is how we form connections during our time together at an event, climate summit, program of study, expedition, or in whatever way you are planning for people to come together.

Heidi earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology at Duke University with a concentration in Marine Science. It is at Duke where she began studying global change in 1992 as a college sophomore. Her PhD years were 1994-1999 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she began studying High Mountains in earnest, and was a member of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and resident at the Mountain Research Station. She next chose to study mountain environments in the Arctic in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska through a United States Geological Survey funded research project based at Colorado State University. And naturally, this led her to even more remote Arctic lands to study how global change affects polar deserts at the Pituffik (Thule) U.S. Space Base in northwest Greenland. Though Heidi sought a position as faculty, it was not clear where she might land - as for many faculty positions in academia are difficult to secure and to depart from.

In 2009, Heidi was hired as the first ecosystem ecologist to work at Fort Lewis College, a Native American Serving Institution in the U.S. Southwest. There, Heidi taught courses in introductory biology for non-science majors, environmental health, ecology and botany. And, in time she migrated from the Department of Biology to the Department of Environment and Sustainability, leading the development of the new environmental science degree program and teaching interdisciplinary courses in science, values and leadership. In 2023, Heidi chose to begin a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies at the Iliff School of Theology without really knowing what theology was or why. It was the next space that she allowed herself to be pulled, and there she has been finding the ideas and people with whom to open space for possibility amid the global crises originating from global inequity and our relationship to the Earth. And, this led to a shift in focus for her work not away from science but to an expansion of science and attention to relationship as central to how and what we can know.

In 2024, Heidi left her position at the college and founded the Center for Earth Theology, an innovative space for immersive experiences that bring together ways of knowing through science with how we know and live into possibility through mysticism, intuition and love. The Center is a passion project, a social enterprise - an experiment - so while new to business Heidi is drawing on years of experience studying Earth and being open to where all and who all may offer guidance.

Heidi visions writing a book - there is a plan too - and she trusts that first investing time in a space like the Center for Earth Theology for unstructured, immersive, Earth-guided experiences in community is essential for the ideas that she will write about and those of many. Part of what Heidi is now exploring is how we create a ‘new wineskin’ - new spaces for immersion and emergence for the many of us who have arrived into wisdom that is essential for these times.

Come and explore. Connect. Write. Speak. Go and Lead. And join Heidi to determine together what spaces for exploration and discovery can be.

Let’s fall in love with our world again.