Thomas L. Fleischner, president
Prescott College
Tom Fleischner is a professor of environmental studies at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, where he has taught for more than twenty years. He has written extensively on natural history, conservation biology, and land management issues, and edited the recent anthology, The Way of Natural History. In addition to his homeland in the Central Highlands of Arizona, he has spent significant field time in the slickrock canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, the Gulf of California, and the coasts and mountains of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and islands of the Gulf of Maine.
Patricia Zaradic, vice-president
Red Rock Institute
Patty Zaradic is a conservation ecologist whose work combines social science and ecological approaches to address pressing conservation issues. A stream ecologist by training, a mother by choice, and a passionate advocate for the importance of natural history, she is the co-founder of the Red Rock Institute, a non-profit research organization focused on understanding the changing human relationships with nature.
Saul Weisberg, secretary
North Cascades Institute
Saul Weisberg is the executive director and co-founder of North Cascades Institute, a nonprofit conservation education organization in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. A national leader in environmental education, Saul worked throughout the Northwest as a wilderness ranger, biologist, fisherman and fire lookout before starting the Institute in 1986. An outstanding naturalist, Saul has written extensively about mountains, watersheds and wildlife, as well as many articles on environmental education. His passions include canoeing, bugs and walking in the mountains in the rain.
John Anderson, treasurer
College of the Atlantic
John Anderson currently holds the William H. Drury, Jr. Chair in Ecology and Natural History at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he has taught for over twenty years. After studying pelicans in the Great Basin Desert he turned to the conservation and study of marine birds and the relationship between cultural history and ecological patterns on Maine’s coastal islands. He also studies the history of Natural History. He recently served as President of the Society for Human Ecology, and as the first Chair of the Human Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America.
Nancy Baron
COMPASS/Aldo Leopold Leadership Program
Nancy Baron is the lead communications trainer for COMPASS and the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program. She leads communication and leadership workshops for scientists in order to help them make their science matter. She started her career as a naturalist in provincial and national parks, a biologist in Banff National Park, and was Director of Education at the Vancouver Aquarium before morphing into journalism. Nancy was a columnist for theVancouver Sun, a commentator for Global TV and has written for a wide range of magazines and newspapers most recently including Nature, Science and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of a field guide, Birds of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Lone Pine Publishing, 1997) and Escape the Ivory Tower: Making Your Science Matter (Island Press, 2010), and for a quarter century has served as a volunteer warden on Mitlenatch Island in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia.
Dan Campbell
The Nature Conservancy
Dan wandered his way from a degree in Transcendentalist literature to Adventure Education (instructor and resident naturalist for Colorado Outward Bound) to teaching Field Ecology at College of Marin, then to opening an Environmental Education field school in Marin, and on to Experiential Education, where he helped found the Association for Experiential Education and received one of the first graduate degrees in the field, and eventually to conservation. He has worked with The Nature Conservancy for 27 years in Arizona, Belize, the Bahamas and Jamaica. Natural History has been Ariadne’s thread woven through all this work. He has found the appreciation, study and practice of Natural History to be a great unifier – from raising funds from the nation’s wealthiest to aiding conservation biologists in setting up field studies. He currently manages TNC’s Verde River Program from Prescott, Arizona.
Arya Degenhardt
Mono Lake Committee
Arya Degenhardt is the Communications Director for the Mono Lake Committee, a non-profit citizens’ group dedicated to protecting and restoring the Mono Basin ecosystem on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in California. She coordinates efforts to inform the public about the Committee’s policy and education work to promote cooperative solutions that protect Mono Lake, and invoke passion on its behalf. She has explored the Mono Basin as a naturalist, photographer, and advocate for over a decade.
Harry W. Greene
Cornell University
Harry Greene is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. Harry´s research on the diversity, evolution, and conservation of reptiles and amphibians has taken him around the world. He is the author of Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature, and well over a hundred scientific papers. In addition to being one of the foremost herpetological researchers in the world, Harry has long been a strong voice for the essential role of natural history and environmental education.
Stephen C. Trombulak, journal editor
Middlebury College
Steve Trombulak holds the Professorship of Environmental and Biosphere Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of natural history and conservation biology, particularly related to birds, mammals, and beetles. Steve has studied the natural history and ecology of the Northern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1980’s, and has participated in numerous projects related to conservation planning throughout the region. He is the author of several articles and books, including The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History and, most recently, Landscape-scale Conservation Planning.
Terry Wheeler
McGill University
Terry Wheeler is an Associate Professor in entomology at McGill University in Montreal, with a focus in insect taxonomy, phylogeny and community ecology. He has also been a natural historian probably since his first mouthful of dirt, although he did not realize it at the time. Natural history flows through much of what he teaches and as well as his research. Terry is the director of the Lyman Entomological Museum, a collection of three million unique volumes of biodiversity data, each impaled on a pin or floating in a vial. The museum’s research in insect taxonomy helps unravel patterns of ecological structure in arthropod communities in habitats from temperate forests to high arctic tundra, and from human-altered, restored and pristine sites.
Photographs by Benjamin Drummond