Cat Buxton
Cat Buxton is a busy cross-pollinator and change facilitator from the White River watershed in Vermont. She is an effective and enthusiastic educator, community organizer, and advocate for food system change. She works with individuals, schools, community groups, and statewide and national organizations to make a difference one meal, one compost pile, and one landscape at a time. From behavior change to climate change, local food to global food, grassroots organizing to legislative policy making, Cat is all about empowering people to affect the necessary changes to restore health to people and planet. Cat works on topics such as soil and ecosystem health, community resilience, composting, water catchment, landscape planning, monitoring landscape function, and increasing biodiversity. Cat is a musician, artist, and self-described microbe geek.
Cat's Background
Cat Buxton is self-educated. In the late 90s, she rode her bicycle for three years and 9000 miles, camping the entire way, across the US and Canada.
With a background in natural foods cooperatives and collectives, Cat moved to the Upper Valley region of Vermont in 1999 to become the grocery manager at the Upper Valley Food Coop.
Cat directed education programs for Cedar Circle Farm & Education Center in East Thetford, VT from 2007-2014, leading farm tours, planning events, teaching classes, pioneering farm to school programs and community gardens, and promoting food policy through grassroots organizing. Read her blog posts. And read her plea for a change in agriculture!
Cat was the Field Organizer for the Vermont Right to Know Coalition which championed Vermont’s first-in-the-nation GMO food labeling law in 2014. Read an article by the Times Argus and a guest post on Bob the Green Guy. And read about Cat's work to Keep the Soil in Organic.
In 2015, Cat Buxton was honored with the Jack Cook Award, an award given annually to a NOFA-VT member who embodies the theme of the conference and shares their knowledge with others - read a bit more!
Since 2016, Cat has studied with microbiologists Walter Jehne, Elaine Ingham, and Nicole Masters, and systems-thinkers Didi Pershouse and Peter Donovan, in addition to the work of many others to further her understanding of the whole system of the Earth and beyond!
Learn a little more about Cat:
Listen to Cat: Cat Duffy Buxton & Didi Pershouse - Soil Carbon Coalition, Book “The Ecology of Care”
Baruch Zeichner for Paradigms (September 2, 2018)
Read this article about Cat's work from the Valley News by EmmaJean Holley in 2017
What Else is Cat Up To?
Besides running Grow More Waste Less, Cat also serves as:
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Program Director with Regeneration Corps
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Garden and Compost Manager at Thetford Elementary School
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Technical Service Provider for the On-Farm Food Scraps Composting Project with the Composting Association of Vermont (CAV)
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Member of the Clifford Park Food Forest design team
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Co-Founder and Board Member of the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition
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Project Leader for the Climate and Community Resilience: Lessons from the Soil series in 2020
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Project Leader for the Soil Series: Grassroots for the Climate Emergency in 2019
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Read about it: Cat Buxton Looks for Climate Change Solution in Soil By Elizabeth M. Seyler for Seven Days (April 17, 2019)
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Member of the National Healthy Soils Policy Network
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UVM Extension Master Composter - managing two active service project sites
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Board Member Soil Carbon Coalition
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Farm to Plate: Food Cycle Coalition; Policy Network; and Agroforestry Network