About the Speaker:

Austin Morin stands proudly at the intersections of science, art, and LGBTQ+ activism on Block Island, Rhode Island; where he works as a conservation biologist, director of Queer Block Island, and founder of Block Island Pride.

In the midst of a pandemic Austin gathered the support of his rural island community to throw the 1st annual pride weekend with drag shows, techno events, theme nights, and a queer nature walk. 

In hopes of finding creative ways to engage the island with queer issues, Austin partners with The Nature Conservancy and the island’s naturalist to create a Queer Nature Walk. The walk takes participants on an educational hike with a short lecture of the variety of ways that we could consider nature to be queer, and cast away the notion that the LGBTQ+ community is “unnatural”.

Austin studied zoology and conservation at the University of St Andrews in Scotland where he wrote his dissertation “The Impacts of Climate Change on Blue Tit Nest Building Behavior”. He is an avid field biologist and has participated in a variety of biological field work with birds, mammals, insects, and fish with The Nature Conservancy on Block Island.