Claire Hope Cummings

Biographical Information
"Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, March 2008). Claire’s stories focus on the environmental and political implications of how we eat and how food and farming reconnects us to each other and the places where we live. Claire brings three decades of broad experience in agriculture to her work. She has farmed in California and in Vietnam, where she had an organic farm on the Mekong Delta. For four years she was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel.

"For the last 15 years, Claire has been active in the local food and farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping to found the Marin County food policy council, and serving on the boards of organizations such as Earth Island Institute, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Food First, and the Elmwood Institute—the predecessor organization for the Center for Ecoliteracy. Claire was awarded a Food and Society Policy Fellow."