About
Kritee Kanko is a Zen priest in the Rinzai lineage of Cold Mountain and a climate scientist with training in microbiology and isotope biogeochemistry. Based in Boulder, Colorado, she serves as a Sensei and founding dharma teacher at Boundless in Motion, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center, and senior scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. She teaches ecodharma and leads grief rituals, focusing on the connections between climate crisis, racial justice, and Buddhist practice. She has taught through various organizations including One Earth Sangha and Impermanent Sangha, with particular emphasis on engaging young adults, LGBTQ communities, and communities of color.
Teaching focus
Kanko's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Kanko teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Kanko's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Kritee Kanko, PhD, Sensei appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Kanko has chosen to share there. Sensei Kritee Kanko, PhD is a climate scientist, educator-activist, grief-ritual leader and a Zen priest. She is a Sensei in the Rinzai Zen lineage of Cold Mountain, a founding dharma teacher of Boundless in Motion and a co-founder of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center. She has served as an Ecodharma teacher for Earth-Love-Go (Lama Foundation), One Earth Sangha, Impermanent Sangha and Shogaku Zen Institute. As a senior scientist in the Global Climate Program at Environmental Defense Fund she helps implement climate-smart farming at scale in India. She was trained as a microbiologist and isotope biogeochemist at Rutgers and Princeton Universities. Kritee believes in identifying and releasing our personal and ecological grief and bringing our gifts into strategic collective actions for societal healing. She is committed to learning from and bringing dharma to young adults, permaculture communities, LGBTQ, black, indigenous and other people of color. Kritee regularly lectures on the inseparability of climate and racial justice at national and international forums including World Council of Churches. Her articles and interviews have appeared in Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, Buddhadharma, Tikkun and several other Buddhist and climate advocacy outlets. Her synthesis of myths surrounding climate crisis, racism, ethics and action is available as a Youtube video. Her interviews and articles can be accessed here. She lives with her husband Imtiaz Rangala, also a climate scientist, in Boulder, Colorado. That body of work places Kanko inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Kanko's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Kanko contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Kanko's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Kanko's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Kanko teaches in the Soto Zen lineage as a priest within that container. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Kanko's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Kanko at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms held alongside teaching focused on contemplative care for the dying, grief, and serious illness. Many of these programs draw on Upaya's Being with Dying curriculum and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians. There's room for personal experience and difficult emotion, held inside the container of practice rather than processed away. The schedule is recognizable as Zen: sittings, walking, meals, talks, and time for questions. Quiet is taken seriously. Most participants leave with both a steadier practice and a more honest relationship with mortality.
