Myron Burnett
Myron is currently a wilderness ranger and wanders the land that Leopold did. At a young age, Myron developed a deep love and respect for the wildest portions of the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest during family hunting and camping trips. After serving in the Marine Corp Myron immediately returned to work in the White Mountains. He guided hunters, trapped and became well known as a proficient hunter and archer. In 1989 he began his career with the Forest Service, first as timber marker and then in 1992 in his dream job as a Wilderness Ranger. Myron brings a uniquely balanced viewpoint to that position which is appreciated by a diverse range of wilderness users, including wilderness advocates, backpackers, horse packers, hunters and livestock producers. He is widely appreciated among Forest Service wilderness managers and other rangers for sharing his considerable wilderness skills including horse packing, use of traditional tools and the dieing art of sharpening cross cut saws. Myron also enjoys developing other primitive skills such as flint knapping, hide tanning and wilderness survival
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Kim Crumbo
Kim is currently the Director of Conservation for the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. From 2000 to 2005 he served as the Northern Representative for the Arizona Wilderness Coalition and Wilderness Coordinator for the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. During those years his accomplishments included coordinating the conservationist's wilderness recommendation, developing a regional wildlands network design, and public outreach for the northern Arizona wilderness campaign. Kim has strived to develop and maintain professional relationships with other conservation groups, legislators and their staff, and agency personal as well as general public outreach. He served 20 years with the National Park Service in Grand Canyon as the river ranger and later as Wilderness Coordinator. Kim worked as professional river guide for 10 years and two years as the Utah Wilderness Coordinator for the Sierra Club.
Before his experience on rivers and in wilderness activism, he spent four years with the Navy’s SEAL Team One completing two combat deployments to Vietnam. Kim received a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Utah State University, with postgraduate work in outdoor recreation. In 1999, Kim received the National Park Service’s “Director’s Wilderness Management and Stewardship Award.” In 1999 The Wilderness Society presented him with “Environmental Heroes Award.” As a result of his military service, Kim earned several combat decorations, including a Bronze Star. His publications include A River Runners Guide to the History of Grand Canyon, an article in the International Journal of Wilderness titled Wilderness Management at Grand Canyon: Waiting For Godot?, and an article about the ecological impacts of roads in Wild Earth magazine.
Steve Dunsky
Documentary filmmaker Steve Dunsky has been a writer/producer/director with the U.S Forest Service for twenty years. He works with his wife Ann, who is also a filmmer. Their productions are shown in visitor centers in from Washington DC to Washington State and from Alaska to Indonesia. Several programs have been aired on public or cable television, and they have won numerous awards and festival prizes. In 2005, they worked with Forest Service colleague Dave Steinke to produce the award-winning feature The Greatest Good about the 100 year history of the Forest Service. They are currently producing Green Fire: The Life and Legacy of Aldo Leopold.
Dunsky has a Master of Fine Arts in film and television production from the UCLA film school. He also completed the UCLA doctoral program (ABD) in film studies with an emphasis on the historical documentary. He received his BA from Bowdoin College, where he studied biology, ecology and philosophy.
Susan Flader
Susan Flader is professor emerita of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she has taught American and world environmental history and the history of the American West. She has published widely on the career and thought of Aldo Leopold, including Thinking Like a Mountain (1974/1994) and The River of the Mother of God (1991), as well as numerous other works of forest and environmental history. She has served as president of the American Society for Environmental History and currently chairs the board of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and she has received numerous national and state awards for publications, service and conservation action.
Don Hoffman
In 2001, Don retired as a Wilderness Program Manager for the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. He spent a significant portion of his 26 year Forest Service career managing and working in the Blue Range Primitive Area and other Wilderness Areas on the Apache Sitgreaves National Forests. He went on to become the first Executive Director of the Arizona Wilderness Coalition (AWC) where he served for nearly six years. Don has been a member of the AWC since 1980 and he currently serves as a Board Director. Don and his wife Jane co-founded the White Mountain Conservation League (WMCL) in 1989 to create a rural organization that could provide a balanced voice regarding local conservation issues. He also currently serves as a Board Director for the Arizona Wildlife Federation.
Don received a B.S. in Business Administration from Ithaca College, just down the road from the Woodstock Arts Festival. Unfit for the business world, he resumed his studies at Northern Arizona University where he earned his MS in Forestry in 1975. He and Jane live on a small farm and manage their Blue River Wilderness Retreat, a cabin and vintage trailer rental business. Email contact: d.hoffman@frontiernet.net or www.blueriverretreat.com
Curt Meine
Curt Meine, Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, is Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation, Director of Conservation Biology and History with the Center for Humans and Nature, and Associate Adjunct Professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. He has authored several books, including Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work and Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation.
Kurt Menke
Mr. Menke is a GIS Specialist and activist. In 2000, Mr. Menke founded Bird's Eye View to apply his expertise with GIS technology towards solving the world's mounting ecological and social dilemmas. Towards this end, Mr. Menke focuses largely on conservation and minority public health working with diverse groups such as NM Wilderness Alliance, the Northern Jaguar Project, WildEarth Guardians, Democracy Now!, NM Game & Fish, the National Library of Medicine, Papa Ola Lokahi and the Wildlands Network. Kurt teaches GIS at UNM's Division of Continuing Education and Central New Mexico Community College, is a co-founder of the Tijeras Canyon Safe Passage Coalition, and serves on the board of directors for both the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council & the New Mexico Geographic Information Council. Kurt has a Masters in Geography from UNM
David R. Parsons
Wildlife Biologist David Parsons received his Bachelor of Science degree in Fisheries and Wildlife Biology from Iowa State University and his Master of Science degree in Wildlife Ecology from Oregon State University. Dave is retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service where from 1990-1999 he led the USFWS’s Mexican gray wolf recovery program. Dave’s interests include the ecology and conservation of large carnivores, protection and conservation of biodiversity, and wildlands conservation at scales that fully support ecological and evolutionary processes. He is the Rewilding Institute’s Carnivore Conservation Biologist.
Janice Przybyl
Janice is the Wildlife Linkages Program Coordinator for Sky Island Alliance. She graduated in 2003 with an M.A. in Environmental Studies from Prescott College, Arizona. Her master's thesis – which explored the theoretical and practical framework for instituting a volunteer-based wildlife tracking project – became the management model for Sky Island Alliance's Wildlife Linkages Program. In her current position, Przybyl recruits, trains, and manages the pool of monitoring volunteers that collects data through wildlife track counts. Collected data is used to guide regional management decisions related to the preservation and restoration of landscape connectivity.
As Sky Island Alliance’s representative, Przybyl participated in the collaborative effort between state and federal agencies, academia, and conservation organizations to produce the Arizona Wildlife Linkages Assessment that identified 150 “linkage zones” important to wildlife movement and migration throughout Arizona. In addition, Przybyl sits on the Pima County Regional Transportation Authority’s Wildlife Linkages Subcommittee to review and recommend funding for wildlife mitigation projects that improve wildlife connectivity associated with transportation projects.
Michael Robinson
Michael Robinson is a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, a national non-profit conservation organization based in Tucson, Arizona. Michael holds an M.A. in literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a B.A. in philosophy and literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He has authored dozens of articles and opinion pieces on conservation issues that have appeared in publications ranging from High Country News to the New York Times.
He is author of Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West (University Press of Colorado, 2005), praised by reviewers as "path-breaking," "definitive," "bringing "history to life," "a work of tremendous scholarship," and "a beautifully written book that captures the feel of western landscapes and the ethos of early 20th-century America with an eloquence unusual for a weighty, scholarly book."
Michael lives and works at the edge of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, which is part of the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area for the endangered Mexican gray wolf.
Doug Scott
Doug Scott, Policy Director of the Campaign for America’s Wilderness, is one of the nation’s leading wilderness historians and experts on the U.S. wilderness movement. He has been involved in the passage of most major wilderness protection laws in the last 40 years, including the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act (1975), Endangered American Wilderness Act (1978), Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980), and the newest – the Omnibus Public Land Management Act (2009) – which protected more than two million acres across nine states.
As a graduate forestry student at the University of Michigan, Doug served with Sen. Gaylord Nelson on the board of the group that organized the first Earth Day. He helped shape strategy and led campaigns at The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club (where he served as national Conservation Director and Associate Executive Director).
Doug is the author of two books (see: www.ourwilderness.org): The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act (Fulcrum Books, 2004) and Our Wilderness: America’s Common Ground (Fulcrum Books, 2009), forward by Robert Redford. Doug is featured as a spokesman about wilderness in the forthcoming film Forever Wild (First Light Films) narrated by Robert Redford (see: www.foreverwildfilm.com).
He is a board member and past chairman of The Wilderness Land Trust. In 1997 the Sierra Club presented Doug its highest honor, the John Muir Award.
Matt Skroch
Matt Skroch is one of the many who read Leopold works over and over, always finding something new to ponder or perceive in awe. Leopold's land ethic is a guiding light for Matt's journey in conservation biology, providing a rich moral backdrop for the application of science to protecting life on earth. Matt is currently working on a graduate degree in conservation planning at the University of Arizona's School of Natural Resources and Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. He has served land and wildlife conservation in many capacities, all with an overarching theme of improving natural resource policy with the combined strength of science and community organizing. He has been appointed, elected, or hired in leadership positions at the Sky Island Alliance, Arizona Wilderness Coalition, Arizona Governors Forest Heath Council, Wildlands CPR, and Madrean Chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology, among others. Matt lives in Tucson with his dog Loca and rescued parrot Zippy.
Dan Shilling
A native Pennsylvanian, Dan Shilling taught high school in his home state after receiving his B.A. from Penn State University. He moved to Arizona in 1980 and earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State University. From 1984 until 2003, Dan was on staff at the Arizona Humanities Council, the last 15 years as director. He guided Arizona’s early research on heritage tourism, eventually editing three publications, and to acknowledge his efforts he received several honors, including the Arizona Office of Tourism “Person of the Year Award.” After serving dozens of commissions, boards, and community groups, in 2005 Dan received ASU Alumni Achievement Award, for his service to the state. He recently completed a three-year, federally funded project on “place-based” tourism, which resulted in the book, Civic Tourism: The Poetry and Politics of Place. In 2009, Dan co-directed an NEH summer institute on Leopold, and he is currently researching a book on sustainability.
Julianne Lutz Warren
Julianne Lutz Warren is on the faculty of the Liberal Studies Program at New York University where she teaches environmental studies. She is author of Aldo Leopold's Odyssey (published under the name Julianne Lutz Newton, Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2006).
Mark Watson
Mark Watson is a Terrestrial Habitat Specialist with the Conservation Services Division, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish in Santa Fe.
He focuses on wildlife connectivity issues by working with New Mexico Department of Transportation to implement wildlife safe passage projects across highways and is the department lead for responding to U.S. Forest Service Travel Management issues at the national level and the for the Santa Fe National Forest.
He is one of two Department representatives on the multi-agency Endemic Salamander Team, which works cooperatively to preclude the need for federal listing for the Jemez and Sacramento Mountain Salamanders, both of which are narrow endemics in New Mexico.
He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology, with ecology and zoology emphases, from the University of New Mexico.
Courtney White
A former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist, Courtney White voluntarily dropped out of the ‘conflict industry in 1997 to co-found The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists and others around the idea of land health (see www.quiviracoalition.org). Since then, his work has expanded to include restoration, resilience, and local food production.
His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Farming, Rangelands, and the Natural Resources Journal. His essay “The Working Wilderness: a Call For a Land Health Movement” was published by Wendell Berry in 2005 in his collection of essays titled “The Way of Ignorance.”
In 2008, Island Press published Courtney’s book Revolution on the Range: the Rise of a New Ranch in the American West. He co-edited, with Dr. Rick Knight, Conservation for a New Generation, also published by Island Press in 2008. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his family and a backyard full of chickens.