Board of Directors
Julian Agyeman
Julian is Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, Medford, MA. His areas of expertise and current research interests are in three broad areas. Each critically explores some aspect(s) of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the environment, whether mediated by institutions or social movement organizations, and the effects of this on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. The areas are: the nexus between the concepts of environmental justice and sustainability and, specifically, the possibility of a 'just sustainability'; the extent, complexity and pervasiveness of 'rural racism' in Britain, its linkages to wider discourses of belonging, 'becoming', continuity and change in racialised spaces and ultimately to discourses of nationhood; and the potential role of 'education for sustainability' in delivering more just and sustainable futures.
He was co-founder in 1988, and chair until 1994, of the Black Environment Network (BEN), the first environmental justice-based organization of its kind in Britain. He was co-founder in 1996, and is co-editor of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability and was elected to the Fellowship of the UK Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA) in the same year. He is a Contributing Editor to Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, an Associate Editor of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture and a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Environmental Education, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, and the Australian Journal of Environmental Education. His most recent books include Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice and The New Countryside? Ethnicity, Nation and Exclusion in Contemporary Rural Britain.
Scott Chaskey
Scott is a farmer, an educator and a writer. Employed by the Peconic Land Trust as a land steward, he has farmed garlic, potatoes, greens, autumn squash (and fifty other crops) for fifteen years at Quail Hill Farm, Amagansett, Long Island. As a lecturer and reader he has given countless presentations concerning community, sustainable agriculture, poetry. He teaches Agroecology through the Friends World Program, Southampton College. He has served as poet-in-residence in numerous schools and museums, and for over twenty years he has taught poetry to children of all ages. Scott is a member of the Governing Council of NOFA-NY (the Northeast Organic Farming Association, vice-president), and he serves on the agricultural committees of East Hampton Town, Cornell Extension (Suffolk County), and Just Food. In 2002 he was awarded his first gold medal, for Excellence in Horticulture, from the Long House Reserve. He is completing a book, This Common Ground, to be published by Viking/Penguin, in 2005. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York, with his wife and their three children, Levin, Rowenna, and Liam.
John Elder, Co-Chair
John Elder and his wife Rita live in Bristol, Vermont and operate a sugarbush in nearby Starksboro with their grown sons. Since 1973 he's taught English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, where his special interests are in American nature writing, Romantic and contemporary poetry, Japan's haiku tradition, and environmental education. Two recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run, have focused on the landscape, environmental history, and cultural meaning of Vermont. His most recent book, Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, retraces the travels of the nineteenth-century conservationist and writer George Perkins Marsh. As an environmentalist, John's emphasis is increasingly on the Northern Forest and on the significance of our choices about food for the health of our region.
Torri Estrada
Torri Estrada is a program officer at the Marin Community Foundation, where he manages the Foundation's environmental grantmaking program. Torri also directs Environmental Justice Solutions, a nonprofit project whose mission is to provide strategic research, technical assistance, and support to community-based organizations, social justice groups, and the public sector in the areas of environmental justice and policy. Previously, Torri served as the coordinator of the Water Funders Alliance at the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a funder working group that facilitated the exchange of information and experience among diverse funders concerned about fresh water and its connection to other critical issues. Torri was also a program officer at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, a senior policy fellow with the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, and Director of the Latino Issues Forum's Environment and Sustainable Development Program. Torri holds a MS degree in Environmental Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan.
Carolyn Finney
Carolyn Finney was born in New York and grew up on an estate where her father was the caretaker and her mother the housekeeper. Though the land was not their own (her family resided in the gardener’s cottage), her parents poured their love into the land. Staying close to her roots, Carolyn pursed an acting career for eleven years, both in New York and Los Angeles. But a backpacking trip around the world in 1987 changed the course of her life. She spent the next five years traveling and living in Africa and Nepal, respectively. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school in 1994 to complete her undergraduate degree, focusing on women and development in Kenya. She then pursued a Masters degree in international development, investigating women’s participation in community forestry management in Nepal. She recently completed her Ph.D. in geography at Clark University in Massachusetts. As a Canon National Parks Science Scholarship recipient, she focused her dissertation research on cultural and environmental encounters in the U.S, highlighting how they are gendered and racialized. In particular, her research seeks to broaden our understanding of African Americans and environment interactions by exploring how the attitudes and beliefs of African Americans are influenced by racialized constructions and representations, informing how African Americans participate in the use of national forests and parks. She is currently a Newhouse/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in Environmental Studies and Humanities. She began her position as Assistant Professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley in July 2007. The journey continues!
Gil Livingston
Gil Livingston graduated from the University of Vermont (B.A. 1975, Political Science), received his law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law (J.D. magna cum laude 1978) and was admitted to the practice of law in California (1978) and Vermont (1979). After law school he worked for two years for a small Burlington, Vermont law firm specializing in municipal planning and zoning and environmental work. Gil then worked for Vermont Legal Aid representing mentally ill clients, followed by a position with the Vermont Attorney General's Office doing environmental enforcement and employment discrimination work. He was Executive Officer to the Vermont Environmental Board for three years managing Vermont's Act 250 permit program. Gil then spent five years as a staff attorney for the Chittenden County Public Defender. He became Vice President for Land Conservation and Counsel for the Vermont Land Trust in December 1990 and President in 2007. Gil currently serves on the board of the Black Family Land Trust, and volunteers his time to that growing organization. He and wife Amy Wright live in Richmond, Vermont with their daughter, Addie.
Danyelle O'Hara
Since 1990, Danyelle O’Hara has worked with organizations abroad and in the United States to build community capacity in issues related to community organizing, development, and conservation. In particular, Danyelle seeks to help strengthen organizational infrastructure that supports communities to develop visions for their aspirations and practical plans for achieving those visions in the most inclusive ways possible. As a consultant, Danyelle provides assistance in program planning, design, monitoring, and evaluation to a range of foundation and nonprofit partners. Danyelle lives in Norman, Oklahoma with her partner Marc and their children, Jonah and Marjanne.
Lauret Savoy, Co-Chair
Lauret Savoy writes across threads of cultural identity to explore their shaping by relationship with and dislocation from the land. Her goal is to produce multiple narratives of such connections and edges from stories we tell of land, its origin and history, to stories we tell of ourselves in the land and of relational identity. A woman of mixed African-American, Native American, and Euro-American heritage, a photographer, and professor of geology and environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, she co-edited The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions 2002) with Alison Deming. Savoy has edited, with Eldridge and Judy Moores, the anthology Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press, 2006, under poet-publisher Barbara Ras). In fall 2005, she became the director of Mount Holyoke College’s Center for the Environment.
Tom Wessels
Tom Wessels is a professor of ecology at Antioch University New England where he was the founding director of the masters degree program in Conservation Biology. Tom considers himself a generalist with interests in forest, desert, and alpine ecosystems and the interface of culture and landscape. He is former chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation which fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. Tom is an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance's SmartWood Green Certification program where he helped draft green certification assessment guidelines for forest operations in the northeastern states and adjacent Canada. His books include: Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, and The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future.
Diana Wright, Former Board Member
We are deeply grateful to Diana Wright, a founding member of the Center for Whole Communities' Board of Directors. Her term ended in fall 2008, but we look forward to her continued advice and support. Thank you, Diana! Diana Wright works at the Sustainability Institute in Hartland VT. In addition to research on resource systems, she manages publications and the Donella Meadows Archive. She lives with her family in Thetford, where they garden, sugar, raise a few chickens and sheep, and try to live on the land in ways that will promote good stewardship.