Charlene Spretnak is the author of several books that proposed a "map of the terrain" and an engagement with various emergent social movements, intellectual orientations, and largely unexplored subjects. She has helped to create an eco-social frame of reference and vision in the areas of social criticism, cultural history, philosophy, and religion and spirituality. Since the mid-1980s, all of her books have been an engagement with modernity, its discontents, and the corrective efforts that are arising. She is a co-founder of the Green Party movement in the United States and is a professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a graduate institute in San Francisco. In 2006 Charlene Spretnak was named by the British government's Environment Department as one of the "100 Eco-Heroes of All Time."