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Beth Daley
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, ENERGY: Must We Grow? The Tensions Between Consumerism and Saving the Planet, 10:45 a.m.

Beth Daley is an environment reporter covering the earth sciences, including environmental health, for The Boston Globe health and science section. She became an environment reporter in 1994. She was formerly a metro reporter covering the Boston Public Schools.

Rebecca Daugherty
Events:
Friday, Breakfast Breakout 3, How to Be Your Own FOIA Lawyer, 7:30 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 26, Meeting of the SEJ First Amendment Task Force, 1:15 p.m.

Rebecca Daugherty, SEJ's board representative for the associate membership, is a former director of the FOI Service Center, a special project of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where she worked with journalists who encountered problems gaining access to public records, and on issues that threaten openness in state and federal governments. In 2001 she was inducted into the Freedom Forum's FOI Hall of Fame. She edited Tapping Officials' Secrets, a guide to open government laws, How to Use the Federal FOI Act, and various projects on access issues. She is a past president of the American Society of Access Professionals, and currently serves on its board. She holds two journalism degrees from the University of Missouri and a law degree from the University of Missouri - Kansas City.

Joseph Davis
Events:
Thursday, Tour 3, Healthy Food Shed
Friday, Network Lunch 26, Meeting of the SEJ First Amendment Task Force, 1:15 p.m.

Joseph A. Davis is SEJ WatchDog Project Director, EJToday Editor, TipSheet Editor and a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. He directs the WatchDog Project, an activity of SEJ's First Amendment Task Force that reports on secrecy trends and supports reporters' efforts to make better use of FOIA. He also edits EJToday, SEJ's daily selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, and TipSheet, a biweekly electronic newsletter of story ideas and sources co-published by SEJ and the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation.

Kirsten de Beurs
Event: Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, What on Earth? Observed Changes in Land Features in North America and Eastern U.S. as Shown by Satellite Images, 9:35 a.m.

Kirsten M. de Beurs is an assistant professor of geography at Virginia Tech. She studies land surface phenology — the timing of biological activity such as plant growth — using satellite imagery. She is using imaging technology to look at how seasons have changed over time in North America, northern Eurasia and Africa. She is looking into direct anthropogenic effects, such as war and institutional change, on the vegetated land surface. She also applies remote sensing data to estimate the effect of gypsy moth defoliation in the Central Appalachians.

Tanya Denckla Cobb
Event: Thursday, Tour 3, Healthy Food Shed

Tanya Denckla Cobb is an experienced mediator, facilitator, and trainer and is certified by the Virginia Supreme Court to mediate at all levels of the court. As the former executive director of two nonprofit organizations, she brings strong experience in working with community issues at the grassroots level. She has facilitated a broad range of community and environmental issues such as community heritage, regional visioning, siting new courts facilities, biosolids, and septic system regulatory negotiation. She helped found, design, and now serves as faculty for the Natural Resources Leadership Institute. She also teaches courses in community food systems and other topics at University of Virginia.

Tom Denton
Event: Thursday, Tour 4, A National Treasure at Peril — the Blue Ridge Parkway

Tommy Denton is the retired editorial page editor for The Roanoke Times in Virginia, where he worked from 1998 until his retirement in 2007. Before that, he worked for 15 years at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas as op-ed page editor, editorial page editor and senior editorial writer and columnist. His non-journalistic career interruptions included stints with the office of the Texas Secretary of State in the mid-1970s and as an aide to the late U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas in the early 1980s.

Theo Dillaha
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change and Agriculture, 10:45 a.m.

Theo A. Dillaha is a professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech. His teaching and research specialty is the effects of agriculture and other land disturbing on the environment and means for minimizing adverse environmental consequences while maintaining agricultural productivity. He is the program director of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to conduct applied research in developing countries to support sustainable land management, protection of natural resources and to improve quality of life for the world's poor.

Dennis Dimick
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change and Agriculture, 10:45 a.m.
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE CRAFT: The Freelance Pitch-Slam, 2:45 p.m.

Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic magazine, was its environment editor and he continues to lead the magazine's coverage of energy and climate issues. An Oregon native, Dimick grew up on a Willamette Valley farm and holds degrees in agriculture and agricultural journalism from Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jim Dooley
Event: Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Exploring Carbon Sequestration Potential Options, 1:25 p.m.

Jim Dooley leads the Joint Global Change Research Institute's and the Global Energy Technology Strategy Project's research related to carbon dioxide capture and storage and the role of this class of technologies in addressing climate change. Dooley was both a lead author for Costs and Economic Potential and the cross-cutting chairman for Market Deployment for the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage.

Peter Dykstra
Event: Friday, Keynote Address: R.K. Pachauri, Chairman, IPCC, 1:30 p.m.

Peter Dykstra, executive producer of CNN's science, technology, environment and weather programming, oversaw the investigative documentaries, "The Truth About Global Warming" and "Broken Government: Scorched Earth." He won an Emmy award for coverage of the 1993 Mississippi River floods, and several Cable/Ace awards. He shared in a 2004 Dupont-Columbia Award for CNN's coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and a 2005 George Foster Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He serves on the advisory board of the Charles Scripps Fellowships, the panel for the John Oakes Awards for Environmental Journalism and judged the Keck Media Awards.

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Bob Edwards
Event: Friday, Opening Plenary, Old King Coal: What's His Role in America's Energy Future? 9:15 a.m.

Bob Edwards is host of "The Bob Edwards Show" on XM Satellite Radio and "Bob Edwards Weekend", which is distributed to public radio stations. An author and award-winning journalist, Edwards has been inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. He previously worked for National Public Radio, hosting "All Things Considered" and helping launch "Morning Edition."

Marc Edwards
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Toying with Toxics: Childhood Exposure to Chemicals, 10:45 a.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 2, Air and Water Pollution You Don't Think About 2:30 p.m.

Marc Edwards is the Charles Lunsford Professor of Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he conducts research on environmental engineering and applied aquatic chemistry. He has worked with numerous homeowners, schools, water utilities, regulatory agencies, and national and international governments on drinking water corrosion issues. His current research emphasizes health problems arising in building plumbing systems.

Kristin Espeland
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE NATION: Broken Bridges, Straight Pipes: The Environmental Impacts of an Aging Infrastructure, 10:45 a.m.

Kristin Espeland joined Louisville, KY's National Public Radio news station, WFPL, as the station's first environment reporter, to lead a new reporting initiative for the Ohio Valley watershed. Previously, she was a reporter and host at Wyoming Public Radio.

Lyle Estill
Event: Thursday, Tour 3, Healthy Food Shed

Lyle Estill has been a journalist, poet, essayist and a writer of short stories. He is best known as the publisher of Energy Blog, and for his newspaper columns, and books. He is the author of Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy and Biodiesel Power: The Passion, People, and Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel.

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Dan Fagin
Events:
Friday, Breakfast Breakout 1, Making the Science Sing: A Multimedia Workshop for Journalists, Communicators and Researchers, 7:30 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 18, Climate Change: What's Left (Legitimately) to Argue About, 1:15 p.m.

Dan Fagin is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. For 14 years he was the environment writer at Newsday, where he was a principal member of two reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His stories on cancer epidemiology in 2003 won both of the best-known science journalism prizes in the United States. He is a co-author of the book Toxic Deception and is working on a book for Bantam/Random House that intertwines three story lines: the history of environmental cancer epidemiology, the half-century saga of the Toms River, N.J., childhood cancer cluster, and current research into gene-environment interactions. Fagin has been a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion at Cambridge University and was president of SEJ in 2003 and 2004.

Andrew Fahlund
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE WATER: Hydropower: Past, Present & Future, 2:45 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE CLIMATE: Rough Road Ahead: Preparing for Climate Change, 9:00 a.m.

Andrew Fahlund is vice president for conservation for American Rivers. His department is responsible for developing, advocating and implementing innovative policy and science tools to ensure that healthy rivers and their watersheds provide human and natural communities resilience in the face of a changing climate. He serves as the co-chair of the Clean Water Network's Global Warming working group. Fahlund directed American Rivers' Dam Reform Program. He has served as chair of the Hydropower Reform Coalition and on the board of directors for the Low Impact Hydropower Institute. He has been a member of several governmental advisory groups and testified before Congress as well as numerous federal agencies.

David Fahrenthold
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE NATION: The Clean Air Act's Unfinished Business, 10:45 a.m.

David Fahrenthold covers the environment for the metropolitan staff of The Washington Post. He has written about attempts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, the effects and causes of climate change in the Washington region, and local debates over energy. David has held this job since 2004. He has worked for The Post since 2000, covering the D.C. police department and Washington Nationals fans for the Metro staff, and writing about New England as a correspondent for the national staff.

Peter Fairley
Events:
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, COAL: Coal Around the Globe, 9:00 a.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 1, Traffic Control, Progressive Urban Planning and Alternative Vehicles 2:30 p.m.

SEJ board member Peter Fairley has tracked the energy story from the coalfields of Inner Mongolia to the powerless villages of Bolivia's Cordillera Real. As an author and contributor to MIT's Technology Review magazine, Spectrum, Discover, and other publications, he is a frequent commentator on innovation and the environment. He blogs at Carbon-Nation.

Josh Foster
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE CLIMATE: Rough Road Ahead: Preparing for Climate Change, 9:00 a.m.

Josh Foster manages the Center for Clean Air Policy's Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative. The program aims to help U.S. partner cities and counties make effective policy and investment decisions to help guard against potential climate change impacts. Josh has 13 years' experience working on climate adaptation at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Science Program Office and managed NOAA's Climate Resilient Communities project from 2005 to 2008. He also has worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Development Program and the White House Office on Environmental Policy, among other groups.

Tom Fox
Event: Thursday, Tour 2, What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them?

Tom Fox is associate professor of forestry in the College of Natural Resources at Virginia Tech, where he teaches classes in forest soils and silviculture. His research and outreach activities focus on silviculture of plantations and natural stands in the southern United States and South America. The goal of his research and outreach program is to increase the productivity, sustainability and profitability of managed forests. He also is director of the National Science Foundation's Center for Advanced Forestry Systems and is co-director of the Forest Nutrition Cooperative. These programs take a multi-disciplinary approach to the productivity and sustainability of intensively managed forests.

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Amy Gahran
Events:
Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past
Friday, Lunch Breakout, Emerging Career Options: Digital Media and Your Future, 12:00 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CRAFT: Not-So-Idle Chatter: How Blogging and Social Media Can Build Your Career, 10:45 a.m.

Amy Gahran is a journalist, editor and "info-provocateur" based in Boulder, CO. For the last decade she's mainly been helping journalists, news organizations and other media professionals wrap their brains around the Internet. She edits the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits group blog about online media, and currently partners with fellow SEJer Adam Glenn on a wide range of projects related to citizen journalism and online media. Gahran has blogged at Contentious.com since 1997. She was SEJ's first employee, mother of the SEJ membership database and discussion list, and has been a longtime contributor to the SEJ TipSheet.

Steven Gardner
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, COAL: Almost Level: Mountaintop Removal Overview, 10:45 a.m.

J. Steven Gardner is president and chief executive officer of Engineering Consulting Services, Inc., a consulting practice in Lexington, Ky. Gardner has worked as an engineer and manager in both mining operations and consulting engineering during his 30-plus-year career. He has served on a mine rescue team. He is a licensed professional engineer in several states and a licensed professional surveyor in West Virginia. He serves as chairman of the Kentucky State Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors and is chairman of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration's national Government, Education and Mining Committee.

Ken Garland
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COMPUTER LAB 1: Lights, Camera, Action! Video Production Basics, 10:45 a.m.

Ken Garland is the broadcast instructor at Virginia Tech. He oversees the broadcast journalism program and teaches courses in broadcast writing, broadcast management and video field and studio production. Prior to teaching, Ken worked in the broadcast industry for 18 years. He was a news and sports anchor and reporter for network affiliate stations in several states. Originally from Milwaukee, Ken earned his undergraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Wisconsin and his Masters' degree in Counseling of Psychology.

Christy George
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 20, Why are Weather Forecasters Climate Skeptics? 1:15 p.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 3, Peek into the Nano World 2:30 p.m.

Christy George, SEJ vice president for programs, produces documentaries at Oregon Public Broadcasting. She started at OPB in 1997, creating a bureau covering the intersection of business and the environment for the Los-Angeles based national business show, "Marketplace". Before that, George edited foreign and national news for The Boston Herald and covered politics for WGBH-TV, where she won a New England Emmy for an investigative documentary about Massachusetts political corruption. She started out in 1976, covering noise and air pollution and neighborhood encroachment by Logan Airport for The East Boston Community News — a dream beat that led to jobs in print, radio and television. George shared in "Marketplace's" Peabody Award in 2001 and her special "Liquid Gold," on how water is being bought, sold and marketed like any other commodity, was part of "Marketplace's" 1998 winning submission for a Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton award.

Michael Gerrard
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change Litigation: The Flood in the Courts, 10:45 a.m.

Michael B. Gerrard is managing partner of the New York office of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm, Arnold & Porter, and has practiced environmental law for 30 years. He has taught environmental law and has written or edited seven books, including Environmental Law Practice Guide (LexisNexis 1992). He also writes an environmental law column for the New York Law Journal and has edited a monthly newsletter, Environmental Law in New York. Gerrard was the 2004-05 chair of the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy and Resources. A former journalist and current SEJ member, he maintains an online service on climate-change litigation.

Denise Giardina
Event: Sunday, Bestsellers Breakfast, 8:00 a.m.

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia. She has written six novels, including The Unquiet Earth, which focuses on the impacts of mountaintop-removal mining. It received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, the oldest literary award in the South. Giardina's nonfiction has been published in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Charleston Gazette, and Charleston Daily Mail. She lives in Charleston, West Virginia, teaches at West Virginia State University and is an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Larry Gibson
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Larry Gibson's family has lived on or near West Virginia's Kayford Mountain since the late 1700's. The 50-acre patch that's left used to be the lowest peak around. Mountaintop-removal mining has turned it into the highest. Gibson has been crusading against mountaintop removal for more than two decades. He hosts hundreds of people annually at Stanley Heirs' Park on Kayford Mountain and he travels around the country telling people about his view of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Parris Glendening
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE LAND: Suburban Decay: The Sub-Prime Mortgage Mess as an Environmental Story, 9:00 a.m.

Before serving as president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, Parris Glendening spent eight years as governor of Maryland, where he made the environment, especially smart-growth education and inclusiveness, the heart of his legislative, administrative and personal agenda. Glendening was elected chairman of the National Governor's Association by his colleagues. He also served as president of the Council of State Governments. He was elected as governor after serving three terms as county executive of Prince George's County, home to 800,000 people just outside of Washington, D.C.

Adam Glenn
Event: Friday, Lunch Breakout, Emerging Career Options: Digital Media and Your Future, 12:00 p.m.

Adam Glenn is an award-winning Internet news veteran now working as an independent online consultant. He has held posts with news media in New York and Washington, most recently as senior producer at ABCNews.com in New York, where he ran health, science, technology and business coverage. His clients have included The J-Lab at the University of Maryland, NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright's charitable foundation Autism Speaks, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation and Rodale Inc. He teaches at Columbia University and at New York University. Adam partners with SEJer Amy Gahran on bouldercarbontax.org, funded by a Knight News Challenge grant.

Jeff Goodell
Event: Friday, Opening Plenary, Old King Coal: What's His Role in America's Energy Future? 9:15 a.m.

Jeff Goodell wrote Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine and frequently writes for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He has written two other books and a memoir.

Amanda Gray
Event: Thursday, Tour 6, Journey Down the James

Amanda Gray graduated from Virginia Tech in 2002 with a B.S. in Environmental Policy and Planning. The summer after graduation she interned with a non-profit organization in Southwest Virginia documenting environmental impacts from mining activities in the region. Since November 2002, she has worked as a Water Planning Engineer for the Virginia DEQ South Central Regional Office. Duties include developing the regional water quality assessment report and Total Maximum Daily Load studies. She enjoys all things Hokie, especially volunteering with her local Virginia Tech Alumni chapter.

Janet Gray
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Does Environment Trump Genetics? Teasing Out the Factors Affecting Women's Health, 10:45 a.m.

Janet Gray, Ph.D, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Vassar College, where she directs the Program in Science, Technology and Society. She is also the project director for the Vassar College Environmental Risks and Breast Cancer Project, a team effort that has led to the production of a bilingual, interactive, user-friendly CD and website, and the editor of the Breast Cancer Fund's State of the Evidence: The Connection Between Breast Cancer and the Environment (2008).

Louis Guillette Jr.
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Does Environment Trump Genetics? Teasing Out the Factors Affecting Women's Health, 10:45 a.m.

Louis J. Guillette Jr. is distinguished professor of zoology at the University of Florida. He has advised countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and Botswana on the development of reproductive biology programs for endangered wildlife. Guillette also is recognized for his research examining environmental contaminants and reproductive/endocrine disruption in various wildlife species, and policy work in human public health. He has served as an expert witness to the U.S. Congress and as a science policy advisor to various government agencies regarding environmental contamination. His recent work examines the effect of pollutant pharmaceuticals.

Linda Gunter
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

Linda Gunter, a 20-year journalism and public-relations veteran, is a co-founder of Beyond Nuclear, where she specializes in media and development. She has worked on energy issues — and specifically the detriments of nuclear power — since 1998. Together with her husband, Paul Gunter, who is also at Beyond Nuclear, she co-authored the 2001 landmark report, Licensed to Kill, exposing the high toll routine operation of coastal nuclear reactors have taken on animal life — especially endangered sea turtles.

Sharon Guynup
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE CRAFT: The Freelance Pitch-Slam, 2:45 p.m.

Sharon Guynup is a writer and journalist specializing in wildlife, conservation and environmental issues, health, and travel. She also is a documentary photographer, teaches at New York University and lectures on international tours. Her first book, State of the Wild 2006: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands and Oceans, was published by Island Press. Her second book is due out from National Geographic Books in spring 2010.

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Ben Halpern
Event: Friday, Breakfast Breakout 1, Making the Science Sing: A Multimedia Workshop for Journalists, Communicators and Researchers, 7:30 a.m.

Dr. Ben Halpern focuses his research at the interface between marine ecology and conservation biology. His research has addressed a broad range of questions that span local to global scales, including spatial population dynamics, trophic interactions in community ecology, and the interface between ecology and human dynamics, all with the ultimate aim to inform and facilitate conservation and resource management efforts in marine systems. Ben received his Ph.D. in marine ecology from UC Santa Barbara and then held a joint post-doctoral fellowship at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and the Smith Fellowship Program sponsored by The Nature Conservancy. He is currently an associate research biologist at UC Santa Barbara and the project lead for a research initiative to evaluate and better inform efforts to do ecosystem-based management (EBM) in marine ecosystems around the world.

Chris Hamilton
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Chris Hamilton is senior vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association. Born and raised in the Wheeling area, Chris is a former coal miner and lobbying is his primary focus.

Greg Harman
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CRAFT: Not-So-Idle Chatter: How Blogging and Social Media Can Build Your Career, 10:45 a.m.

Greg Harman has been reporting for various newspapers — mainly in Texas — since 1996. He started his blog, Harman on Earth, in 2007 to give his favorite news features a semi-stationary home and to connect with fellow writers, thinkers and activists. He is currently the staff writer at the Current of San Antonio. He also is an avid Twitter user: gharman.

Jim Hecker
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE CRAFT: Getting the Goods: Using Court Records for Environmental Investigations, 9:00 a.m.

Jim Hecker is the environmental enforcement director at Public Justice, a national public-interest law firm. Hecker has handled environmental citizen lawsuits on behalf of national environmental groups, citizen groups and other clients at Terris & Sunderland, a Washington, D.C. public-interest environmental law firm. After 11 years, he left private practice to join Public Justice in October 1990 and create its Environmental Enforcement Project. Hecker has litigated about 30 citizen suits in fourteen states under federal environmental statutes regulating clean air, clean water, hazardous waste and coal mining. His current work includes legal challenges to mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia.

Dennis Heinemann
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE WATER: Are the Oceans Already Lost? 9:00 a.m.

Dennis Heinemann is Ocean Conservancy's senior scientist and vice president for the new Ocean Climate Change program. In recent years, he has co-authored a book on marine reserves and fisheries, led a research project to support the development of a large network of MPAs in San Andres, Colombia, produced a report documenting ecologically unsustainable fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, written a review paper highlighting the costs and risks of persistent overfishing, and successfully employed science-based advocacy for MPAs at the State and Federal levels. Earlier this year Dr. Heinemann co-authored a study published in Science that presented a global map of human impacts on the ocean. His background is in the fields of conservation biology, fisheries science, seabird ecology, computer simulation modeling, and applied statistics. Heinemann has conducted marine research around the world — in Alaska, Antarctica, on the west coast, in New England, and in Australia.

Clem Henriksen
Events:
Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, COMPUTER LAB 1: Where's the News? Geodata and Mapping Basics, 10:45 a.m.

Clem Henriksen has worked as a geographic information system (GIS) professional in both the public and private sectors for more than 28 years. In that time, he has witnessed GIS technology move from the mainframe to the cellphone. A graduate of San Francisco State University, he works as a market analyst at ESRI, the market leader in GIS.

Thomas Henry
Events:
Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts
Friday, Network Lunch 9, Emerald Ash Borer: Worse than Chestnut Blight and Dutch Elm Disease? 1:15 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENERGY: Take Two: Nuclear Power Reconsidered, 10:45 a.m.

Tom Henry, The (Toledo, OH) Blade's environmental writer-columnist, is one of the nation's most experienced newspaper writers covering the Great Lakes and energy issues, especially nuclear power. He spent 10 days in Greenland in late July, researching a four-day series on climate change and taking more than 3,000 photographs. Tom began writing a weekly column for The Blade's Sunday news analysis section in April 2007. He also freelances articles on a variety of subjects for his newspaper and other publications, including SEJournal. He has had essays about environmental journalism appear in Harvard University's Nieman Reports and Michigan State University's EJ Magazine, as well as the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.

Andrew Herrmann
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE NATION: Broken Bridges, Straight Pipes: The Environmental Impacts of an Aging Infrastructure, 10:45 a.m.

Andrew W. Herrmann is managing partner of Hardesty & Hanover, LLP, a transportation consulting engineering firm headquartered in New York. During his more than 30-year career he has overseen many of the firm's major bridge projects. He is past president of New York City's Metropolitan Section and past chair of the Structural Division's Technical Administrative Committee on Bridges. He was co-chair of the 2005 Structural Engineering Institute's Structures Congress in New York City. Herrmann served on the advisory council for the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2001, 2003 and 2005 Report Cards for America's Infrastructure.

David Hill
Event: Thursday, Tour 4, A National Treasure at Peril — the Blue Ridge Parkway

David Hill is a landscape architect and the principal of Hill Studio, a multidisciplinary architecture, planning, preservation and design firm in Roanoke, Va. He earned a master of landscape architecture from Harvard University and bachelor of landscape architecture from Virginia Tech.

Lawrence Hincker
Event: Friday, Breakfast Breakout 2, Covering Tragedies and Disasters: Trauma on Both Sides of the Pen, Computer and Camera, 7:30 a.m.

Larry Hincker has worked at Virginia Tech since 1988 and served as head of university relations since 1989. He is responsible for all communication activities of the university, including the public radio station for central and southwestern Virginia, WVTF. He was the public face of Virginia Tech as it dealt with the largest media gathering on any university campus after the murders of April 16, 2007.

Nathaniel Hitt
Event: Thursday, Tour 5, Old River, New Challenge

Nathaniel (Than) P. Hitt is a research associate in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research explores issues of environmental quality in stream and river ecosystems, focusing on the links between water quality, biological integrity and human welfare.

Cheryl Hogue
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 25, Inside SEJ: Ask a Board Member, 1:15 p.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 5, Black Bears, Endangered Mussels, and Scientists 2:30 p.m.

Cheryl Hogue, SEJ vice president for membership, has covered national environmental policy developments from Washington, D.C., since 1987. For the last several years, she has reported on pollution-related issues for Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of a major scientific organization, the American Chemical Society. Her first environmental reporting was a series on the health of the Chesapeake Bay for The Daily Banner in Cambridge, Md., on the Delmarva Peninsula. After daily newspaper stints there and at the Montgomery Journal in Rockville, Md., she moved to the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (BNA). While at BNA, she gained a dozen years of experience covering Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and court cases affecting federal pollution controls. She also covered international environmental issues for BNA and reported daily from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the negotiations on 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. She co-authored Toxic Substances Control Guide: Second Edition, a 1992 BNA book detailing the major U.S. laws regulating chemicals.

Constance Holden
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE CLIMATE: Close Quarters: Could an End to Population Growth Help Stabilize the Climate?, 2:45 p.m.

A graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, with a major in performance on the piano, Constance Holden has been on the news staff at Science for more than 35 years, covering a range of subjects, particularly related to social and behavioral sciences. In recent years she has also been involved in covering the science and politics of stem cells. She is also an artist, specializing in oil portraits.

Roger Holnback
Event: Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past

Roger Holnback is executive director of the Western Virginia Land Trust, which has recently been instrumental in negotiating a conservation easement for 13,000 acres of high elevation land (over 1,500 feet) east of McAfee Knob in the area of Carvin's Cove Reservoir. His biggest focus is the Appalachian Trail corridor in the Catawba Valley area, which is slowly changing as a result of development. Holnback also is president of the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, the volunteer organization responsible for maintaining the Appalachian Trail over McAfee Knob.

Don Hopey
Events:
Thursday, Tour 4, A National Treasure at Peril — the Blue Ridge Parkway
Friday, Network Lunch 7, Feeling Blue: Air Pollution in the Blue Ridge and Other National Parks, 1:15 p.m.

Don Hopey, SEJ board member and future conference sites chair, has covered the environment for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette since 1992. He has written series about an 80-mile canoe trip through the Wild & Scenic sections of the Allegheny River, the "Wise Use" movement in Pennsylvania and problems with the nation's hazardous waste incinerators. He participated in an end-to-end hike of the Appalachian Trail by five eastern newspapers in 1995, hiking more than 500 miles from Virginia through Pennsylvania. Reports on the hike were reprinted in a book, An Appalachian Adventure. He is co-author of Exploring the Appalachian Trail: Mid-Atlantic States, one of five guide books in a series that highlights the trail's social and natural history. He teaches an environmental issues and policy class at the University of Pittsburgh.

Richard Huff
Events:
Friday, Breakfast Breakout 3, How to Be Your Own FOIA Lawyer, 7:30 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 27, More FOIA For Ya: Making Them Hand It Over, 1:15 p.m.

Richard L. Huff served as one of two co-directors of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Information and Privacy, the office responsible for government-wide FOIA policy guidance, from 1982 until his retirement in 2005. There he acted on all Department of Justice administrative appeals from denials under the Freedom of Information Act. He has litigated and supervised FOIA cases in the district and appellate courts and has testified before Congress on the implementation of the 1996 Electronic FOIA Amendments and on the interface between the FOIA and the Privacy Act. Since retiring Mr. Huff has made FOIA and Privacy Act training presentations for the Departments of Justice, Commerce, Army, and Homeland Security, as well as for the Environmental Protection Agency, the USDA Graduate School, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the American Society of Access Professionals.

Bruce Hull
Events:
Thursday, Tour 2, What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them?

R. Bruce Hull is a professor in the College of Natural Resources at Virginia Tech, practicing social ecology. His work focuses on healing forests that have been fractured by pressures of urbanization and globalization. He is author and editor of more than 100 publications, including two books, Infinite Nature and Restoring Nature. He advises numerous community groups such as LandCare, the Model Forestry Policy Program and Centers for Urban and Interface Forestry, all of which promote sustainable living and land use.

Spencer Hunt
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COAL: Beyond Coal: Strategies for Appalachian Reclamation and Renewal, 10:45 a.m.

Spencer Hunt is the environment reporter for The Columbus Dispatch, where he has covered issues related to coal mining, coal-fired power plants, and pollution in Ohio River communities. He has previously worked as a state government and politics reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer and covered the Illinois legislature for Gannett News Service.

Roberta Hylton
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE LAND: Biodiversity, People, and the Planet: An Appalachian Lesson, 2:45 p.m.

An Appalachian native, Roberta Hylton has been the project leader in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's southwestern Virginia field office since 1994 and an agency employee for more than 16 years. She manages biologists who work to recover and protect more than 30 threatened and endangered species, most of which are freshwater mussels and fish found across four states in the Tennessee and Cumberland river basins. Among other conservation roles, she was an advisory biologist at the U.S. Department of Interior, most recently working to further the establishment of El Mirador-Rio Azul National Park in the Peten region of Guatemala.

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Cale Jaffe
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change Litigation: The Flood in the Courts, 10:45 a.m.

Cale Jaffe is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. He helped win a unanimous victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy, a landmark Clean Air Act decision. Jaffe is the lead attorney representing a coalition of organizations challenging Dominion Power's proposal for a coal-fired power plant in the southwest Virginia mountains. He teaches environmental law and federalism at the University of Virginia Law School. He serves on the board of governors for the Environmental Law Section of the Virginia State Bar, and is on the board of the Virginia Conservation Network.

David Jenkins
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE NATION: Environmental Policy, Public Opinion, and the Election, 2:45 p.m.
Saturday, Lunch and Plenary Session, Election 2008 and the Environment, 12:00 p.m.

David Jenkins is the government affairs director of Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP), a position he has held since January of 2005. He also serves as National Coordinator of the Environmental Stewardship Coalition for McCain-Palin 2008. In 2006 Jenkins was heavily involved in REP's efforts on behalf of 30 GOP Congressional candidates that REP endorsed. Most recently he has been involved in REP's decision to endorse Senator McCain in the 2008 presidential race, and has developed REP's first candidate training manual to help GOP candidates take responsible positions on environmental issues.

Peter Jenkins
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE LAND: Animal Business: Wildlife Trafficking and International Law, 10:45 a.m.

Peter T. Jenkins manages Defenders of Wildlife's campaigns aimed at protecting global biodiversity, reforming the wildlife trade and blocking imports of non-native invasive species into the United States, and overseeing its Mexico City office. Jenkins has worked for various groups and agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Mexican wolf reintroduction project. He has taught at the University of New Mexico Law School's Center for Wildlife Law. He is the principal author of two Defenders' reports. Jenkins is a founder of the National Environmental Coalition on Invasive Species and a member of the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group.

Andrew Jordon
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Andrew Jordon is a former chairman of West Virginia Coal Association and is president of Pritchard Mining's Four-Mile Mine near Market, WV.

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Tim Kaine
Event: Wednesday, Opening Reception at the Hotel Roanoke, 5:00 p.m.

Tim Kaine has focused on land use, mass transit and conservation policies since being elected Virginia's governor in 2006. His administration's efforts have been honored by the Virginia Transit Association and the state chapter of the American Planning Association. Kaine appointed a Climate Change Commission and has spent $660 million to clean Virginia's rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. Kaine is an attorney, former Catholic school principal and entered politics in 1994 when he was elected to Richmond, Virginia's city council.

George Kegley
Event: Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past

George Kegley was born on a Wythe County farm in Virginia, graduated from Roanoke College and reported for The Roanoke Times for 44 years. In retirement, he is a board member of Western Virginia Land Trust, Preservation Foundation of Roanoke Valley and other non-profits. He and his wife donated a conservation easement on their 116-acre farm, one of only two farms in Roanoke. He also is a board member emeritus of the Historical Society of Western Virginia and edits its journal.

Gene Kitts
Event: Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Mountaintop Removal in Context, 10:30 a.m.

Gene Kitts, senior vice president for mining services at International Coal Group, is responsible for the development of new projects, environmental compliance, safety, regulatory permitting, geology and exploration, human resources, information technology, purchasing and operations support. Kitts previously held executive management positions with various Massey Energy subsidiary companies. He is chairman of the West Virginia Coal Association's Environmental / Technical Committee.

Bill Kovarik
Event: Friday, Welcoming Remarks, 9:00 a.m.

Bill Kovarik, SEJ's board representative for the academic membership, is a professor of Media Studies at Radford University in southwestern Virginia where he teaches science and environment writing, media history, media law and web design. He has also served on the faculty at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland. Kovarik's professional experience includes reporting and editing for Jack Anderson, the Associated Press, The Charleston (S.C.) Courier, The Baltimore Sun, Time-Life Books, Latin American Energy Report and Appropriate Technology Times. His books include The Forbidden Fuel (1982), Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (with Mark Neuzil, 1996), and Web Design for the Mass Media (2001). He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (1974), the University of South Carolina (M.A., 1983) and the University of Maryland (Ph.D., 1993).

Margaret Kriz
Events:
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENERGY: Take Two: Nuclear Power Reconsidered, 10:45 a.m.
Saturday, Lunch and Plenary Session, Election 2008 and the Environment, 12:00 p.m.

Margaret Kriz covers energy and environmental issues for National Journal. Kriz joined the magazine in 1987 after writing about environmental issues for the Bureau of National Affairs newsletter company. Kriz has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois and a master's from American University. In 2002, American Journalism Review named Kriz one of Washington journalism's "unsung heroes." From 2005 to 2006, she was a fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Kriz has served on the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists and on the advisory board of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

John Kunich
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 13, Betting the Earth: We're All In on Mass Extinction, 1:15 p.m.
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE LAND: Biodiversity, People, and the Planet: An Appalachian Lesson, 2:45 p.m.

John C. Kunich is an environmental and biodiversity law expert. He is a professor and director of faculty scholarship and research at Charlotte School of Law in North Carolina. Among his publications are Ark of the Broken Covenant: Protecting the World's Biodiversity Hotspots (Prager, 2003) and Killing Our Oceans: Dealing with the Mass Extinction of Marine Life (Praeger, 2006). Kunich has twice given testimony before House of Representatives committees regarding environmental and biodiversity law. He was invited to the Oxford Round Table on International Trade and the Environment and was featured on CNN International to talk about the current mass extinction.

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Philip Landrigan
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Toying with Toxics: Childhood Exposure to Chemicals, 10:45 a.m.

Philip Landrigan is chairman of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, and professor of Pediatrics and director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Landrigan is a pediatrician, epidemiologist, and internationally recognized leader in public health and preventive medicine. He has been a member of the faculty of Mount Sinai School of Medicine since 1985 and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine since 1990.

Jacques Leslie
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE WATER: Hydropower: Past, Present & Future, 2:45 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, COAL: Coal Around the Globe, 9:00 a.m.

Jacques Leslie has been writing narrative nonfiction about the world's most pressing environmental problems. His July 2000 Harper's Magazine cover story about global water problems was included in The Best American Science Writing 2001 and was a finalist for the John B. Oakes Award for environmental journalism. Leslie continued his exploration of water issues in his 2005 award-winning book, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment. He most recently wrote a cover story for Mother Jones magazine about China's rush to emulate American living standards and the resulting environmental degradation.

David Lochbaum
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

David Lochbaum is director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, where he leads the group's efforts to ensure the safety of nuclear power in the United States by monitoring licensed commercial nuclear plants to identify and publicize safety risks. He has more than seventeen years' experience in commercial nuclear power plant start-up testing, operations, licensing, software development, training and design engineering. In 1992, he and a colleague found deficiencies in the design for spent-fuel pool cooling at the Susquehanna plant, which resulted in safety improvements there and at other nuclear plants with similar problems.

Penny Loeb
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 14, Covering Floods: Before and After, 1:15 p.m.
Sunday, Breakout Author Session 1, Finding a Sense of Place: Appalachia in Literature and Journalism, 9:45 a.m.

Penny Loeb is a freelance journalist who has chronicled the struggle of a community as they grappled with and fought against the environmental degradation inflicted by the coal industry of West Virginia. Her book, "Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice from Big Coal," was published last year. Loeb has been a senior editor for U.S. News & World Report and an investigative reporter for Newsday. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1988.

Nancy Lord
Event: Sunday, Breakout Author Session 2, Exploring the Horizons: Natural History and Travel Writing, 9:45 a.m.

Nancy Lord, Alaska's current Writer Laureate, holds a liberal arts degree from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. In addition to being an independent writer, she fished commercially for many years and has, more recently, worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships. She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and three books of literary nonfiction (most recently Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale's Truths, Counterpoint Press, 2004). A collection of essays/memoir is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, and she is currently at work on a book about climate change in the north. She teaches part-time at the Kachemak Bay Branch of Kenai Peninsula College and in the low-residency graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her honors and fellowships include grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation and a Pushcart Prize.

Joe Lovett
Events:
Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Mountaintop Removal in Context, 10:30 a.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COAL: Beyond Coal: Strategies for Appalachian Reclamation and Renewal, 10:45 a.m.

Joe Lovett, executive director and a founder of the Appalachian Center, is a 1995 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has served as a law clerk to the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia; as counsel in precedent-setting legal challenges to mountaintop removal (Bragg v Robertson and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v Rivenbaugh); and through additional legal challenges added millions of dollars to the West Virginia Coal Mining Special Reclamation Fund. In a nationally precedent-setting case, he succeeded in stopping the US Environmental Protection Agency from illegally weakening a central portion of the Clean Water Act in West Virginia (the anti-degradation provisions of the state and federal water quality standards).

Amory Lovins
Events:
Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Winning the Coal Endgame: Principles of and Progress Toward an Oil-Free America, 12:45 p.m.
Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Winning the Coal Endgame: The Megawatt and Micropower Revolutions, 3:00 p.m.

Amory Lovins is a consultant and experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford universities. His work focuses on transforming the hydrocarbon, automobile, real estate, electricity, water, semiconductor and other sectors toward advanced resource productivity. He has briefed 18 heads of state, held several visiting academic chairs, authored or co-authored 29 books and hundreds of papers, and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. His honors include nine honorary doctorates and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Francesca Lyman
Events:
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Does Environment Trump Genetics? Teasing Out the Factors Affecting Women's Health, 10:45 a.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 7, It's Jail for You! Building Green in the Blue Ridge 2:30 p.m.

Francesca Lyman, author of The Greenhouse Trap: What We are Doing to the Atmosphere and How We Can Slow Global Warming, with World Resources Institute, is a freelance magazine writer who currently contributes to MSN Green Channel, Ms. Magazine, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, Horizon Air, the Green Guide/National Geographic, Parks & Recreation Magazine, and other magazines and newspapers. She has written about the environment often over her 20-year journalistic career, which has included being editor of Words by Wire syndication service, an environmental columnist for MSNBC.COM, and a beat reporter for two New Jersey newspapers. She is a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont.

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Tim Mallan
Event: Thursday, Tour 5, Old River, New Challenge

Tim Mallan is the manager of environmental affairs at Appalachian Power, an operating company of American Electric Power. Tim has been working for AEP for 28 years in the environmental field, having come to the company after eight years with an environmental regulatory agency. He participates in legislative and regulatory development activities for the company in Virginia and West Virginia and serves as spokesperson on issues related to the company's environmental protection activities.

Joe Manchin
Event: Wednesday, Opening Reception at the Hotel Roanoke, 5:00 p.m.

Joe Manchin is governor of West Virginia. He serves as chairman of the Southern States Energy Board, the Democratic Governors Association, the Southern Governors' Association and as president-elect of the Council of State Governments. He was a member of the state legislature from 1982 to 1996. Manchin was West Virginia secretary of state from 2000 to 2004. He is an avid outdoorsman, hunter and fisher.

John Manuel Jr.
Events:
Thursday, Tour 5, Old River, New Challenge
Friday, Network Lunch 29, Working Environmental Themes into Multi-Genre Books, 1:15 p.m.
Sunday, Breakout Author Session 2, Exploring the Horizons: Natural History and Travel Writing, 9:45 a.m.

John Manuel is a freelance writer and author living in Durham, North Carolina. His first book, A Natural Traveler Along North Carolina's Coast, is a primer on the natural history of that coast as well as a guidebook. His second book, The Canoeist, is a memoir that explores the issues of the environment, father and son relations, and a changing nation through a series of canoe trips down eastern rivers.

Jeffrey Marion
Event: Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past

Jeffrey L. Marion is a recreation ecologist who studies the impacts of hikers and campers on parks and forests around the United States. He works on the Virginia Tech campus, both as an adjunct professor in natural resource recreation, and at the office of the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Marion is quite familiar with McAfee Knob, a famous point along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. As a professional, he has determined how past development has affected the forest. As a hiker, he has helped his son establish lower-impact campsites there.

Mick Mastilovic
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

Mick Mastilovic, vice president of operations at Virginia Uranium, Inc., has more than 15 years' experience in the energy industry. Mastilovic was previously director of production operations at USEC, a supplier of low-enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power plants. Previously, he worked in the product development and process engineering departments at Framatome (now Areva), which provides nuclear power consulting services in Lynchburg, Va., and worked on the development of power generation and transmission assets for PSE&G, a utility company.

Tom McAvoy
Events:
Thursday, Tour 2, What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them?

Tom McAvoy has been the manager of the Beneficial Insects Laboratory in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech since 1977. His work involves testing, releasing and monitoring biological control agents for the control of exotic plants and insects. He also led the program to monitor and control the hemlock woolly adelgid at Mountain Lake. McAvoy participated in two exploratory trips to Sichuan Province, China, and one to Japan in search of predators of hemlock woolly adelgid. This year, he led a survey trip of potential biocontrol agents in Shandong Province, China.

Robert McClure
Events:
Thursday, Tour 2, What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them?
Friday, Network Lunch 12, Whence the Endangered Species Act? 1:15 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE LAND: Suburban Decay: The Sub-Prime Mortgage Mess as an Environmental Story, 9:00 a.m.

Robert McClure, a 17-year veteran of the environment beat and an SEJ board member, has focused on natural-resource issues including fisheries, timber and mining since joining the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999. There he has produced major projects on the Endangered Species Act, the environmental tailspin of Puget Sound and the 1872 Mining Law. He also covers climate change regularly in his blog, Dateline Earth, and occasionally in the newspaper. McClure previously worked at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where he covered several government beats and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before focusing on the environment and writing extensively about the need for restoration of the Florida Everglades. McClure, a University of Florida graduate, also spent an academic year in the Knight Wallace Fellows program at the University of Michigan. His professional career began at United Press International's Miami and Tallahassee bureaus. McClure is the recipient of numerous state, regional and national journalism awards including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism.

Nancy McGehee
Event: Thursday, Tour 4, A National Treasure at Peril — the Blue Ridge Parkway

Nancy McGehee worked in regional rural-tourism development before becoming an associate professor in the hospitality and tourism management department at Virginia Tech. McGehee also works with the Appalachian Tourism Research and Development Center, where she is conducting research on sustainable rural-tourism development on the Ricky Knob segment of the Blue Ridge Parkway. She has worked with numerous community-based, rural-tourism groups throughout the United States and the world.

Patrick McGinley
Events:
Friday, Breakfast Breakout 3, How to Be Your Own FOIA Lawyer, 7:30 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 27, More FOIA For Ya: Making Them Hand It Over, 1:15 p.m.

Patrick C. McGinley is the Judge Charles H. Haden II Professor of Law at the West Virginia University College of Law, where he teaches courses in environmental and administrative law. He assisted in the preparation of The Sago Mine Disaster Report to West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III. McGinley is representing The Associated Press in a FOIA case seeking e-mail communications between the Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court and the CEO of Massey Energy Company; the e-mails were sent when the men vacationed together on the French Riviera while the company had a multi-million dollar case pending before the court.

Tara Rae Miner
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE CRAFT: The Freelance Pitch-Slam, 2:45 p.m.

Tara Rae Miner, managing editor of Orion magazine, has dedicated her career to editing, writing and nonprofit work. She has had stints at the magazines Camas, Headwaters News, and the Chronicle of Community as well as the Center for the Rocky Mountain West and the Oregon Natural Desert Association. A native of Oregon, Tara grew up hiking, horseback riding, canoeing and telemark skiing in the wild mountains, forests and deserts of the West. She received a master's degree from the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana, with an emphasis on environmental and creative writing.

Jerry Moles
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE LAND: Biodiversity, People, and the Planet: An Appalachian Lesson, 2:45 p.m.

Jerry A. Moles has worked in various leadership roles for environmental groups. He is consulting director of Land Stewardship, New River Land Trust; facilitator of LandCare in Grayson County, and New River Valley in Virginia and North Carolina; board member of the New River Roundtable, the International Analog Forest Network (The Netherlands), EcoEra (Costa Rica) and the Blue Ridge Forest Cooperative in Virginia. Jerry led the University of California, Berkeley negotiating team to mediate the dispute over the implementation of the Endangered Species Act. He is co-founder, board chair and former director of the NeoSynthesis Research Centre in Sri Lanka.

Celeste Monforton
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: "Where There's Smoke..." : Job Hazards as Forerunners of Public Hazards, 2:45 p.m.
Friday, Beat Dinner 3, Unmuzzling Science: Breaking Through the Governmental and Professional Barriers, 7:00 p.m.

Celeste Monforton is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at The George Washington University's School of Public Health and Health Services. In 2002, she joined the university's Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, which has been examining the nature of science and how it is used and misused in government decision-making and legal proceedings. Her research articles have focused on how industries manipulate scientific evidence to create uncertainty about health risks to delay protective regulatory action. Monforton has worked for other agencies in various capacities. She also contributes to a blog, The Pump Handle.

Jeff Moyer
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change and Agriculture, 10:45 a.m.

Jeff Moyer is an expert in organic crop production systems including weed management, cover crops, crop rotations, equipment modification and use, and facilities design. Throughout his more than 30 years at the Rodale Institute, he has helped countless farmers make the transition from conventional, chemical-based farming to organic or sustainable methods. Moyer is a member of the National Organic Standards Board, assisting the USDA Secretary of Agriculture in developing standards for materials to be used in organic production as well as advising on other aspects of implementing the National Organic Program.

Deborah Murray
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Deborah Murray, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, has more than 20 years' experience working there on a variety of environmental issues. She most recently explored the impacts of mountaintop-removal coal mining on water quality and habitats. Earlier this year, she filed a petition with the federal government to abolish a policy that allows coal companies to avoid examining the impacts of coal mining on threatened and endangered species. She also is challenging the Corps of Engineers' permit for a reservoir in Virginia, resulting in the largest destruction of wetlands in the mid-Atlantic region in the 36-year history of the federal Clean Water Act.

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Laurel Neme
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE LAND: Animal Business: Wildlife Trafficking and International Law, 10:45 a.m.

Laurel Neme is an environmental consultant and writer, as well as a trained economist. She has worked for the US Treasury Department, USAID, NGOs and others on natural resource management and policy in Africa and elsewhere. She is currently writing a narrative non-fiction book on wildlife trade and forensics. Neme holds a PhD from Princeton University and an MPP from University of Michigan.

Mark Neuzil
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 14, Covering Floods: Before and After, 1:15 p.m.
Friday, Beat Dinner 4, Eco-sins? Should Journalists Treat Environmental Issues As Ethical Issues? 7:00 p.m.

Mark Neuzil is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. He is the author or co-author of several books, including most recently A Spiritual Field Guide: Meditations for the Outdoors with the theologian Bernard Brady.

John Nielsen
Event: Friday, Breakfast Breakout 1, Making the Science Sing: A Multimedia Workshop for Journalists, Communicators and Researchers, 7:30 a.m.

John Nielsen previously covered environmental issues for National Public Radio (NPR). His reports aired regularly on "All Things Considered," "Morning Edition" and "Weekend Edition." He also prepared documentaries for the NPR/National Geographic Radio Expeditions series, which is heard on "Morning Edition." John's Condor: To the Brink and Back — The Life and Times of One Giant Bird (HarperCollins, 2006) focuses on the long-running fight to save the California condor, a giant rare vulture that used to be common near his childhood home, the tiny town of Piru, California.

Bruce Nilles
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE NATION: The Clean Air Act's Unfinished Business, 10:45 a.m.

Bruce Nilles joined the Sierra Club in 2002 and currently directs its National Coal Campaign, the largest component of Sierra Club's new Climate Recovery Campaign. The national coal campaign is working to reduce America's overreliance on coal, slash coal's contribution to global warming and other pollution woes, end destructive mining, and secure massive investments in clean energy alternatives. Bruce previously worked as a staff attorney for Earthjustice's San Francisco office, and during the Clinton Administration as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division in Washington D.C. He received his J.D. and B.S. degrees from the University of Wisconsin.

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Rajendra Pachauri
Event: Friday, Keynote Address: R.K. Pachauri, Chairman, IPCC, 1:30 p.m.

Rajendra K. Pachauri is chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also is chief executive of The Energy and Resources Institute, which conducts research and provides information to organizations and countries on energy, environment, forestry, biotechnology and the conservation of natural resources. He has advised several international forums on climate change and its policy dimensions. Pachauri also has worked for organizations such as the World Bank and served on the boards of numerous groups, including Toyota. He has a background in economics and industrial engineering.

Fred Palmer
Event: Friday, Opening Plenary, Old King Coal: What's His Role in America's Energy Future? 9:15 a.m.

Fred Palmer is senior vice president of government relations for Peabody Energy. He joined Peabody in February 2001 and is responsible for advancing state and federal policies related to the production and use of coal. Prior to joining Peabody Energy, he served for 15 years as chief executive officer of Western Fuels Association, Inc. He most recently served as counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Shook Hardy & Bacon, a Kansas City-based law firm.

Ann Pancake
Events:
Sunday, Bestsellers Breakfast, 8:00 a.m.
Sunday, Breakout Author Session 1, Finding a Sense of Place: Appalachia in Literature and Journalism, 9:45 a.m.

Ann Pancake is a short-story writer and novelist. Last year, she published Strange as This Weather Has Been, a novel exploring mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state. Pancake's work has been awarded with the Pushcart Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other accolades. She also has received creative writing fellowships from various states.

David Poulson
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, COMPUTER LAB 2: Data Part 1: Translating Data into News, 10:45 a.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, COMPUTER LAB 2: Data Part 1: Translating Data into News, 9:00 a.m.

Dave Poulson is associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He teaches computer-assisted, investigative and other environmental reporting courses in addition to organizing and teaching workshops for professional journalists. Before joining the Knight Center in January of 2003, he had a 22-year career as a newspaper reporter and editor, mostly covering the environment.

Joni Praded
Event: Sunday, Book Publisher Pitch-Slam, 11:00 a.m.

Joni Praded is editorial director of Chelsea Green Publishing Company, whose books on progressive politics and sustainable living include national bestsellers, environmental classics, exposés, and practical advice on green living. Over her 25-plus years in publishing, Joni was also director of program advancement for environmental book publisher Island Press, a consulting senior editor for Chelsea Green, and the longtime director and editor of Animals Magazine, which covered wildlife, the environment, and animal issues. Her articles on national and international wildlife issues, emerging environmental concerns, and sustainable tourism have appeared in numerous national magazines. Early in her career she held editorial positions at Little, Brown and Company and Boston Magazine.

Glenn Proctor
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE NATION: Diversity and Environmental Journalism, 9:00 a.m.

Glenn Proctor, a journalist for over three decades, has been vice president and executive editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch since November 2005. A frequent speaker around the country on journalism careers, management and motivation, Proctor is a board member of the Oakland-based Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Kent State University School of Journalism and the American Press Institute. Proctor received the National Association of Black Journalists Legacy Award last year.

Judy Purdy
Event: Sunday, Book Publisher Pitch-Slam, 11:00 a.m.

Judy Purdy is an acquisitions editor at the University of Georgia Press, where she acquires titles in natural history, nature writing, history of science, and environmental studies with a regional focus. The Press publishes scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences, creative and literary works designed for a national readership, and general-interest books about the Southeastern United States. Recent Press nature titles have been recognized with such awards as the John Burroughs Medal, the National Outdoor Book Award, and the Southern Environmental Law Center's Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award. Scholastic magazine named A Natural Sense of Wonder among this year's 10 best books for teachers. Judy began her career with the National Audubon Society, is author of Medicinal Plants and Home Remedies of Appalachia, and has been a science editor and writer for nearly two decades.

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Dan Radmacher
Events:
Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, THE NATION: Environmental Policy, Public Opinion, and the Election, 2:45 p.m.

Dan Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times. He completed his Master's Degree in Journalism at the Missouri University Graduate School of Journalism in 1989. For 10 years, he was the editorial page editor of The Charleston Gazette, West Virginia's largest daily newspaper, before becoming an editorial writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2003. He moved to Roanoke in 2005.

Nick Rahall
Event: Saturday, Lunch and Plenary Session, Election 2008 and the Environment, 12:00 p.m.

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) of Beckley has represented the Third Congressional District of West Virginia since 1976. In his 16th term, he is the dean of the West Virginia delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. He is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and vice chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Rahall has received many awards for his work on environmental issues. This year, Rahall was awarded the National Parks Conservation Association's prestigious William Penn Mott, Jr., Park Leadership Award for his work to protect America's national parks.

John Randolph
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE NATION: The Clean Air Act's Unfinished Business, 10:45 a.m.

John Randolph is a professor and chair of the Urban Affairs and Planning Department at Virginia Tech, where he has been on the faculty since 1979. Randolph was director of the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research from 1988 to 1995. He has written more than 50 articles and reports, and two textbooks, Environmental Land Use Planning and Management (2004) and Energy for Sustainability: Technology, Planning, Policy (with Gilbert Masters, 2008), both published by Island Press. He received the Virginia Energy Award in 1992 for his energy research and the 2006 William R. and June Dale Prize for excellence in urban and regional planning.

Bill Raney
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Bill Raney has been president of the West Virginia Coal Association for many years. Born and raised in a coalfield company town, he is a former reserve Army officer.

Cindy Rank
Event: Friday, Opening Plenary, Old King Coal: What's His Role in America's Energy Future? 9:15 a.m.

Cindy Rank was president of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy from 1988 to 1994 and now chairs its mining committee. She has led research and protests on coal mining and water quality issues in her region since the late 1970s. She was the first to compile a map documenting the extent of stream loss from mountaintop-removal valley fills in West Virginia. She has also testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees on matters related to oversight and enforcement of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

Luis Reyes
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

Luis A. Reyes is Region II administrator for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission office in Atlanta, Ga. He previously served as the executive director for operations at the commission. Under Reyes's tenure, the commission was recognized for its commitment to diversity and, last year, it was ranked one of the "Best Places to Work." Previously, Reyes worked for the Argonne National Laboratory at the Experimental Breeder Reactor II facility at the Idaho Engineering Laboratory. He has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Meritorious Rank Awards.

Norm Reynolds
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

Norm Reynolds, president, chief executive officer and director of Virginia Uranium, Inc., has over 30 years' experience in mineral exploration and development in Canada and the United States. As president of Marline Uranium Company, Reynolds was responsible for uranium exploration efforts in the eastern United States, which led to the discovery of the Coles Hill property in Virginia more than 25 years ago. Reynolds founded and operated ProMark, a national geophysical consulting firm based in Chatham, Va., until 2005.

Catharine Richert
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, ENERGY: Energy 101: A Primer for Reporters, 2:45 p.m.

For more than three years, Catharine Richert has written about Congress and the intersection of policy and politics. Most recently, she covered the nearly two-year debate over the new farm bill for Congressional Quarterly. She is now writing about Senate politics for CQ. Richert used to report on government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry for FDA Week, and consulted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She holds a degree in environmental studies and history from Oberlin College.

Roger Rivera
Event: Saturday, Breakfast Plenary, Environmental Justice and the Poor, 7:30 a.m.

Roger Rivera is the president and founder of the National Hispanic Environmental Council, a national, non-profit, membership-based organization established in 1997 and based in Alexandria, Va., near Washington, D.C. With over 6,000 members, NHEC is the only national Latino environmental and natural resource organization in the country. NHEC has numerous programs involving policy work and community organizing, including the recent creation of the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change. Prior to founding NHEC, Rivera was a political and public affairs consultant in D.C.

David Roper
Event: Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Future Energy, 2:05 p.m.

L. David Roper, a native of Oklahoma, has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a postdoctoral position at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, he taught at a small college in Louisville, Ky. He joined the physics department at Virginia Tech in 1967; he retired in 1998. He has done research in particle physics phenomenology, biophysics theory and resource depletion.

Jeff Ruch
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE LAND: Joy Ride or Ecocide? ORVs on Public Lands 10:45 a.m.

Jeff Ruch has been the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility since 1997. He helped to start PEER and for its first four years served as general counsel and program director. Prior to that Ruch was the policy director and a staff attorney at the Government Accountability Project, representing whistleblowers from both the public and private sector. Before coming to DC, Jeff worked in California state government for 17 years, mostly in the State Legislature as counsel to various committees where he drafted literally hundreds of laws on topics ranging from energy conservation to the rights of employed inventors.

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David Sachsman
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CRAFT: Environment Reporters of the 21st Century, 10:45 a.m.

David Sachsman is the West Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In 2005, Dr. Sachsman led the team evaluating the U.S. Agency for International Development's environmental communication and education projects in more than thirty countries. Dr. Sachsman serves on the editorial board of SEJournal. In 1998, he served as co-chair of SEJ's annual conference. He is widely published in environmental communication and media history, and co-author of several works on environmental risk communication, as well as The Reporter's Environmental Handbook.

Joel Salatin
Event: Thursday, Tour 3, Healthy Food Shed

Joel Salatin is a full-time farmer in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. A third generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm full-time in 1982 and continued refining and adding to his parents' ideas. The farm services more than 1,500 families, 10 retail outlets, and 30 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, egg-mobile eggs, "pigaerator" pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing. Salatin is the author of six books, and his farm was featured in The New York Times bestseller "Omnivore's Dilemma" by food writer Michael Pollan.

Terry Sammons
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COAL: Beyond Coal: Strategies for Appalachian Reclamation and Renewal, 10:45 a.m.

Terry R. Sammons is an attorney with a background in environmental science and real estate. He has started many companies during his career, including Sammons Law Firm in Gilbert, WV, and companies that test coal, analyze water, provide Internet service, provide geotechnical analysis, develop real estate and conduct mine rescue recovery. He has taught at the college level and has been active in the community, serving on a number of boards, including that of WV Flood Disaster Recovery and Holmes Safety Association, which promotes coal-mine safety.

Darren Samuelsohn
Event: Friday, Breakfast Breakout 4, Newsmaker Breakfast: 2009 Energy Policy Legislation, 7:30 a.m.

Darren Samuelsohn is a senior reporter at Greenwire and its sister publications, E&E Daily, E&E News PM and ClimateWire. Since 2001, he has reported on all aspects of the climate change debate based in Washington D.C., including international negotiations, Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. In 2007, Samuelsohn won Honorable Mention from the National Press Club for analytical newsletter reporting. From 1998-2000, he was the outdoors, travel and entertainment writer for The Olympian in Washington state. Samuelsohn is a South Florida native and has a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Andy Sarjahani
Event: Thursday, Tour 3, Healthy Food Shed

Andy Sarjahani came to Virginia Tech for his dietetic internship program to become a Registered Dietitian. While at Virginia Tech, his fire for sustainable food systems was lit after discovering the Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group. He conducted a food waste study that prompted Virginia Tech Dining Services to remove trays from their all-you-can-eat facilities in an effort to decrease food waste. He then moved to upstate New York to apprentice with the Hayes family on their sustainable livestock farm, Sap Bush Hollow. He is Virginia Tech's first sustainability coordinator for housing and dining services.

Jackie Savitz
Events:
Friday, Beat Dinner 15, The Changing Climate of Ocean Biodiversity, 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE WATER: Are the Oceans Already Lost? 9:00 a.m.

Jackie Savitz is the senior campaign director for Oceana's pollution campaigns. She has shaped and led campaigns and projects dealing with global-warming pollution from ships, mercury contamination of fish and cruise-ship pollution, among other issues. She has been Oceana's point person in directing coalition strategy to urge the federal government to regulate major industrial sources of greenhouse gases. Savitz was executive director of the Coast Alliance, a network of more than 600 organizations throughout the United States working to conserve coasts. Savitz has a background in marine biology and environmental toxicology and more than fifteen years of policy analysis experience.

Mark Schapiro
Events:
Friday, "Blackout" (Documentary Premier), 9:30 p.m.
Sunday, Breakout Author Session 3, Writing About Science and the Environment, 9:45 a.m.

Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. His work has appeared in The Nation, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. Previously, he was features editor at Transitions magazine, covering Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He was co-producer of the segment "Tobacco Traffic" on PBS's NOW with Bill Moyers.

Jack Schenendorf
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE NATION: Broken Bridges, Straight Pipes: The Environmental Impacts of an Aging Infrastructure, 10:45 a.m.

Jack Schenendorf's practice concentrates on transportation and legislation with a particular focus on legislative strategy, legislative procedure, and the federal budget process. He was recently appointed by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert to the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, where he serves as vice chairman. For about 25 years, Schenendorf was on the staff of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, serving as chief of staff from 1995 to 2001. He also was chief of transition of the Transition Policy Team for the U.S. Department of Transportation during the Bush/Cheney transition.

Mark Schleifstein
Events:
Wednesday, SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment, 8:00 p.m.
Friday, Breakfast Breakout 2, Covering Tragedies and Disasters: Trauma on Both Sides of the Pen, Computer and Camera, 7:30 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 15, Keeping Levee Builders Honest, 1:15 p.m.

Environment reporter Mark Schleifstein, an SEJ board member, has worked at The Times-Picayune since 1984. He is the co-author with John McQuaid of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, published by Little, Brown & Co. His reporting during and after Hurricane Katrina was among the newspaper's stories honored with 2006 Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service and Breaking News Reporting and the George Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting. Stories prior to Katrina on coastal science issues were honored in 2006 with a special award from the American Geophysical Union. The 2002 series he co-authored, "Washing Away: How south Louisiana is growing more vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane," won the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2003 Excellence in Media award and the 2003 National Hurricane Conference media award. He also was a co-author of the 1996 series, "Oceans of Trouble: Are the World's Fisheries Doomed?" which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Debra Schwartz
Event: Sunday, Breakout Author Session 3, Writing About Science and the Environment, 9:45 a.m.

Debra A. Schwartz is a veteran freelance reporter of news and features about the environment and science, with extensive work appearing in major newspapers, newswires, magazines and online venues including ABCnews.com. She has lunched with Frederick Wilhelm de Klerk, covered former Czech president Vaclav Havel and reported about travel from the South China Sea. Following her doctoral research into investigative reporting about the environment and advocacy, her dissertation effort evolved into her first book, Writing Green: Advocacy & Investigative Reporting About the Environment in the Early 21st Century.

Jacob Sewall
Event: Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, The Climate Challenge: Setting the Context for Considering our Energy Future Options, 9:00 a.m.

Jacob O. Sewall is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. Sewall uses numerical models to study the climate history, change and dynamics of our planet. The focus of Sewall's research is identifying and quantifying the impacts and causes of climate change, and he is interested in changes associated with declining Arctic sea-ice cover and climate impacts on precipitation patterns and water resources. Sewall has published several papers and given numerous presentations on these topics and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change.

Philip Shabecoff
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Toying with Toxics: Childhood Exposure to Chemicals, 10:45 a.m.

Philip Shabecoff, author of Poisoned Profits, was the chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for fourteen of the thirty-two years he worked there as a reporter. After leaving the Times, he founded and published Greenwire, an online daily digest of environmental news. He has appeared on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, CNN News, C-Span, National Public Radio, and the BBC. For his environmental writing, Shabecoff was selected as one of the "Global 500" by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Marley Shebala
Events:
Saturday, Breakfast Plenary, Environmental Justice and the Poor, 7:30 a.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE NATION: Diversity and Environmental Journalism, 9:00 a.m.

Marley Shebala has 24 years' journalism experience and works for the Navajo Times as their senior news reporter. She also serves on the University of Colorado-Boulder Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellowship Board and recently was asked to join the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources Council of Advisors. Shebala is Diné (Navajo) and A:shiwi (Zuni). She is To'aheedliinii (The Water Flow Together clan), which is her mother's clan, and born for Naasht'ezhi (Zuni), which is her father's clan. Her Zuni clan is Frog.

Julie Sibbing
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, ENERGY: Beyond Corn: Making Biofuels from Grass, Trash and Algae, 9:00 a.m.

Julie M. Sibbing is director for climate, agriculture and wildlife for the National Wildlife Federation. Her work includes promoting sustainable, low-carbon bioenergy; advocating for full funding and improved implementation of U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation and energy programs; and promoting improved carbon sequestration on agricultural lands as part of comprehensive efforts to address global warming. Sibbing has focused on wildlife implications of bioenergy over the past three years and worked to develop and promote a new incentive program in this year's farm bill to help farmers grow next-generation energy crops. Sibbing worked on wetlands policy for 13 years and has published numerous articles and reports.

James Simon
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CRAFT: Environment Reporters of the 21st Century, 10:45 a.m.

James Simon is an award-winning journalism professor at Fairfield University who has had a life-long interest in the impact of the news media on government, politics and elections. Simon was a reporter and a top editor with The Associated Press for 10 years. He was named national journalism "Teacher of the Year" in 2003 by a division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the author of scholarly research articles published in such journals as Political Communication, Public Understanding of Science, and Science Communication, and he serves on the editorial board of journals like The Newspaper Research Journal.

Katherine Slaughter
Event: Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts

Katherine E. Slaughter is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. She was mayor of Charlottesville, Va., and founding member and former president of the Virginia Conservation Network. In the 1980s, she fought to stop uranium mining at the Coles Hill deposit in Virginia.

Dave Sligh
Events:
Thursday, Tour 6, Journey Down the James
Sunday, Post-Conference Tour: From the Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay

Dave Sligh is the Upper James Riverkeeper for the James River Association. He covers the James basin from Richmond to the River's headwaters in the mountains along Virginia's western border. Dave earned an environmental science degree from the University of Virginia and a law degree from Vermont Law School. He has been a scientist and supervisor in Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality, the Southeast representative for American Rivers, executive director of the Soque River Watershed Association, and taught environmental science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

William Snape III
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change Litigation: The Flood in the Courts, 10:45 a.m.

Bill Snape, senior counsel, coordinates the Center for Biological Diversity's legal and policy work on endangered species, wilderness, and energy from Washington, DC. He did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Los Angeles and received his law degree from George Washington University. He has written numerous articles, as well as a book, on natural-resource issues in his 20-year career, has taught environmental and international law, and was with Defenders of Wildlife before joining the Center.

Jack Spadaro
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, COAL: Almost Level: Mountaintop Removal Overview, 10:45 a.m.

Mine safety & health and environmental specialist Jack Spadaro has a 38-year career safeguarding people from environmental and health and safety hazards related to mining. He continues to serve as an expert witness and consultant in environmental and mine health and safety litigation.

Vikki Spruill
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, THE WATER: Are the Oceans Already Lost? 9:00 a.m.

Vikki N. Spruill began serving as president and CEO of Ocean Conservancy in 2006. She previously was president and founder of SeaWeb, a non-profit organization that uses strategic communications techniques to advance science-based ocean conservation. Before SeaWeb, Spruill spent 15 years in public relations. She holds leadership roles with Sky Truth; the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program; COMPASS, the Communications Partnership for Science and the Sea; the Ocean Hall of the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum; the SeaChange Investment Fund; and the Pew Fellows Advisory Committee. Spruill recently founded FoundationWorks to help organizations with the grant-making process.

David Startzell
Event: Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past

David Startzell is executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the non-profit that works to preserve the land around the footpath and oversees trail maintenance. Startzell was involved in the effort to federally protect the entire length of the trail starting in 1978. He also has chaired a task force that produced a report, Trails for All Americans, for the National Park Service and trail groups. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt presented him with the Conservation Service Award in 1995. He also serves on the boards of the American Hiking Society and the Partnership for the National Trails System.

Charles Steger
Event: Friday, Welcoming Remarks, 9:00 a.m.

Charles Steger became Virginia Tech's 15th President in January of 2000. Dr. Steger possesses both breadth and depth of experience in all three missions of the university: teaching, research, and extension and outreach. In addition, he has extensive international experience combined with a long history of engagement with both state and federal government. Dr. Steger's ties to Virginia Tech span four decades. He has been student, teaching faculty, academic department head, college dean, vice president, and now president. While a faculty member, he won two teaching excellence awards.

Shirley Stewart Burns
Event: Saturday, Breakfast Plenary, Environmental Justice and the Poor, 7:30 a.m.

Shirley Stewart Burns is the daughter of an underground coal miner in southern West Virginia. She wrote the 2007 book, Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970-2004. She is interested in the communities, environment and histories of the southern West Virginia coalfields and has a Ph.D. in the subject.

Bill Street
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE WATER: Can This Bay Be Saved? 10:45 a.m.

William Street is the executive director for the James River Association in Richmond, Va. He is responsible for overseeing all of JRA's efforts to promote conservation and responsible stewardship of the James River's unique natural and historic resources. Previously, he worked for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation; has led state and regional policy initiatives related to water quality, watershed restoration, agriculture and land protection; worked for private consulting firm Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Duke University Wetland Center, and the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia.

Ann Swanson
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE WATER: Can This Bay Be Saved? 10:45 a.m.

Ann Swanson, a wildlife biologist and ecologist, has spent the last 20 years as the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. The commission's responsibility is to sponsor legislation at the state level and to work with state lawmakers, the U.S. Congress, and federal and state regulatory agencies to coordinate programs aimed at restoring the Chesapeake Bay. She serves as chairman of the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. In 2001, she was awarded the bay region's highest conservation award, Conservationist of the Year. She also is a published illustrator.

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Peter Thomson
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 25, Inside SEJ: Ask a Board Member, 1:15 p.m.
Sunday, Breakout Author Session 2, Exploring the Horizons: Natural History and Travel Writing, 9:45 a.m.

Peter Thomson is an independent writer, editor and radio producer living in Boston. His 2007 book Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal, about his round-the-world pilgrimage to the world's largest body of fresh water in Siberia, was praised by The New York Times as "superb" and "compelling." Peter was the founding producer and editor of National Public Radio's groundbreaking environmental news program "Living on Earth," and served in a variety of senior positions in a decade with the program. His work has been honored with numerous awards for reports and documentaries on subjects ranging from oil, natives and wildlife on Alaska's North Slope to threats facing America's drinking water supply to the environmental legacy of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources. Peter is a member of the SEJ board of directors and the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting.

Tim Thornton
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Tim Thornton has been a journalist since 1976. He's worked at community papers, alternative papers and dailies in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. He's collected a number of awards, including the Virginia Press Association's D. Lathan Mims Award "for editorial leadership and service to the community." His work on mountaintop-removal coal mining has been recognized by the Virginia Press Association and the Society of Environmental Journalists. It also earned him the Southern Environmental Law Center's 2008 Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment.

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Thomas Wagner
Events:
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE WATER: What's Hot at the Poles: Polar Science and the International Polar Year, 10:45 a.m.

Thomas Wagner is program director for Antarctic earth sciences at the National Science Foundation. He has taught volcanology at the university-level in Papua New Guinea, where he also consulted for foreign aid, biodiversity and environmental projects for six years. Wagner then became program director of volcanology at NSF. He has a Ph.D. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mark Wagstaff
Events:
Thursday, Tour 2, What Are Forests Worth? What Are They For? Can We Sustain Them?

Dr. Mark Wagstaff is a professor of Recreation, Parks and Tourism at Radford University. Mark's interests and research revolve around outdoor leadership development. He has co-authored several text books on outdoor leadership and currently coordinates the outdoor recreation concentration at Radford. Mark is a Leave No Trace Master Educator and is a certified instructor for the Wilderness Education Association. He spent ten years as a professional river guide running rivers nationally and internationally and also served as an Outward Bound Instructor. Mark has been leading extended wilderness expeditions on public lands throughout the United States for 25 years.

Matthew Waite
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, COMPUTER LAB 1: Where's the News? Geodata and Mapping Basics, 10:45 a.m.
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, COMPUTER LAB 2: Data Part 2: Projects and Stories, 2:45 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COMPUTER LAB 2: Data Part 2: Projects and Stories, 10:45 a.m.

Matthew Waite is a news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. He previously worked as an investigative and general assignment reporter at the Times, and a night cops reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He is a 1997 graduate of the University of Nebraska and the co-author of a book, Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss, with Kevin Carmody and Craig Pittman. It will be published next spring.

Bud Ward
Events:
Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Program Overview and Introductions, 8:30 a.m.
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE CRAFT: Environment Reporters of the 21st Century, 10:45 a.m.

Freelancer Bud Ward is editor of The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media and president of Morris A. Ward, Inc., a consulting firm in northern Virginia. Ward started in environmental journalism in 1974 and in 1982 founded The Environmental Forum magazine. In 1988, he launched Environment Writer, a newsletter for journalists covering environmental issues. A co-founder of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), he has written two books and more than 1,000 articles on environmental issues. The founder of the Central European Environmental Journalism Program, Ward has been a member of the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation's Environmental Journalism Advisory Committee. He now is advisory editor for the Oxford University Second Edition of Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, and an advisor for the United Nations Human Development Report, Climate Change and Human Development. Ward is prize administrator for the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment, at $75,000 the richest prize in journalism. He lectures and speaks often on environmental journalism and on challenges facing journalists and the news business.

Ken Ward Jr.
Events:
Wednesday, Covering Climate Change and Our Energy Future in Rural America, Mountaintop Removal in Context, 10:30 a.m.
Friday, Welcoming Remarks, 9:00 a.m.

Ken Ward Jr., a reporter for The Charleston (WV) Gazette since 1991, is a graduate of West Virginia University. He has received numerous regional and national reporting awards for his coverage of strip mining, pulp mills, timbering and medical waste incinerators. He is a three-time winner of the Scripps Howard Foundation's Edward Jr. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting and in 2000 received the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Ward is also chairman of the Society of Environmental Journalists' First Amendment Task Force. In 2006, he spent six months researching coal mine issues as an Alicia Patterson Fellow. The resulting series received a medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Jennifer Weeks
Events:
Friday, Network Lunch 28, Green Goes With Everything: Pitching to Non-Environmental Outlets, 1:15 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENERGY: Take Two: Nuclear Power Reconsidered, 10:45 a.m.
Saturday, Mini-Tour 5, Black Bears, Endangered Mussels, and Scientists 2:30 p.m.

Jennifer Weeks is an independent writer specializing in energy and environmental issues. She has published news, opinion and feature articles in more than 40 newspapers, magazines and online outlets, including The Washington Post and Grist. She also has fifteen years' experience as a Congressional aide, lobbyist and public policy analyst. She ran a research project on nuclear energy and arms control policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government from 1996 to 2001.

Tim Wheeler
Events:
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 1, THE WATER: Can This Bay Be Saved? 10:45 a.m.
Friday, Network Lunch 6, Dirty Dealing: Promises & Pitfalls of Pollution Trading, 1:15 p.m.
Sunday, Post-Conference Tour: From the Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay

Tim Wheeler, SEJ's president of the board, covers the environment for The Baltimore Sun. He has written about the environment frequently in his 30-year journalistic career, which included a decade as the beat reporter for The Evening Sun and then The Sun after the two papers merged. He spent two years as an editor helping to coordinate The Sun's medical, science, religion and environmental coverage, during which reporters for the paper won an SEJ award for spot-news coverage of a chemical-laden train fire in downtown Baltimore. His reporting on the Chesapeake Bay, childhood lead poisoning and other environmental topics also has won multiple awards. Before coming to Baltimore, he worked for newspapers in Richmond and Norfolk, VA., and for Media General News Service in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, with a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Carolyn Whetzel
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CLIMATE: Climate Change Litigation: The Flood in the Courts, 10:45 a.m.

Carolyn Whetzel, SEJ's treasurer of the board and finance chair, is an environmental reporter for BNA, a private publisher headquartered in Washington, D.C. that covers legislative developments, federal and state laws and regulations, court decisions, and economic trends. Whetzel is based in California and covers a variety of state environmental issues including air and water quality, hazardous wastes, chemicals, and energy since 1992. Her work appears primarily in BNA's Daily Environment Report, Environment Reporter, Toxics Law Reporter, Chemical Regulation Reporter, Occupational Safety & Health Reporter, and Daily Report for Executives. Whetzel joined BNA in 1970 while attending George Washington University, but left four years later to travel and move to California. Before rejoining BNA, she wrote for in-house publications for several companies and institutions and was a freelance writer in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Dallas.

LaJuana Wilcher
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

LaJuana S. Wilcher, a biologist and attorney, has served as the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water, secretary of Kentucky's Environmental and Public Protection Cabinet, commissioner of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, and, in private practice, as counsel to municipal, corporate and nonprofit clients. She also teaches environmental law and policy at Vermont Law School during the summers. Wilcher serves on the U.S. Commission for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Hydrological Programme.

Dale Willman
Events:
Friday, Lunch Breakout, Emerging Career Options: Digital Media and Your Future, 12:00 p.m.
Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, COMPUTER LAB 1: Stories in Sound: Audio Production Basics, 2:45 p.m.
Friday, Beat Dinner 15, The Changing Climate of Ocean Biodiversity, 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, COMPUTER LAB 1: Stories in Sound: Audio Production Basics, 9:00 a.m.

Dale Willman is an award-winning radio correspondent and editor, formerly with National Public Radio, who now is executive editor of his own nonprofit multimedia reporting company, Field Notes Productions. He is the winner of SEJ's 2006 David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award.

Roger Witherspoon
Events:
Thursday, Tour 8, Nuclear Power — from Ore to Volts
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, ENERGY: Take Two: Nuclear Power Reconsidered, 10:45 a.m.

Roger Witherspoon, contributing editor to US Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine, has been a journalist for 42 years. He has worked as a staff reporter, editor or columnist for several newspapers, including the (New York) Daily News, The Record (Hackensack, NJ), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Dallas Times Herald; written and produced for KNBC-TV, Burbank, and CNN; reported for WCBN Radio, Ann Arbor; and written for several magazines, including Time, The Economist, Fortune, Essence, and Consumer Reports. He is the author or co-author of three non-fiction books. He is a co-founder of the Association of Black Journalists.

Leonard Witt
Events:
Friday, Lunch Breakout, Emerging Career Options: Digital Media and Your Future, 12:00 p.m.
Friday, Beat Dinner 8, Whither Journalism: Emerging Directions, 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, THE CRAFT: Not-So-Idle Chatter: How Blogging and Social Media Can Build Your Career, 10:45 a.m.

Leonard Witt is the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. His academic interests include public and citizen journalism and how to get citizens' voices heard. He is founding president of the Public Journalism Network, an online network of citizens, journalists and academics interested in public and citizen journalism. Witt blogs and is now developing what he calls representative journalism, which is based on small journalism-centered communities.

Christine Woodside
Event: Thursday, Tour 7, The Appalachian Trail — Land with a Past

SEJ member Christine Woodside is a freelance writer from Connecticut and the editor of the journal, Appalachia. The second edition of her book on energy will be published in a few months under the title Energy Independence. She hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, in 1987.

Robert Wyss
Event: Sunday, Breakout Author Session 3, Writing About Science and the Environment, 9:45 a.m.

Bob Wyss wrote the environmental textbook Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat, which was published in December by Routledge. He is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian and Yankee. He was a reporter and editor for 28 years at the Providence Journal covering such beats as energy, environment and business.

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John Yetman
Event: Friday, Concurrent Sessions 2, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: "Where There's Smoke..." : Job Hazards as Forerunners of Public Hazards, 2:45 p.m.

John Yetman is a senior environmental health specialist for the Fairfax County Health Department. He is the lead specialist for investigating childhood lead poisoning cases and represents the county as an expert on radon, mold and other public health risks. He has been in regulatory code enforcement for 30 years, the last 20 with Fairfax County. Yetman helped develop the county's naturally occurring asbestos program in 1988. He was the first Virginia asbestos coordinator for the National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants in the northern half of the state in 1981.

Roe-Hoan Yoon
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 3, COAL: Coal Around the Globe, 9:00 a.m.

Roe-Hoan Yoon is a professor of mineral processing at Virginia Tech. Dr. Yoon's research interest is in resource recovery, energy, and colloid chemistry. He and his colleagues at Virginia Tech have developed many patented technologies that have been commercially deployed in industry. He has recently been inducted to the National Academy of Engineering. He jointed the faculty of Mining Engineering at Virginia Tech in 1979, and served as director of the Center for Coal and Mineral Processing during 1988 and 2001. He is currently serving as director of the Center for Advanced Separation Technologies (CAST), a consortium of seven universities.

Z

Paul Ziemkiewicz
Event: Saturday, Concurrent Sessions 4, COAL: Beyond Coal: Strategies for Appalachian Reclamation and Renewal, 10:45 a.m.

Paul Ziemkiewicz joined the Alberta (Canada) Department of Energy in 1978. There, he directed its reclamation research program in coal and oil-sand mining. He also served on Alberta's regulatory review committee and served as the research manager of the province's Office of Coal Research and Technology. In 1988, he became director of West Virginia University's National Mine Land Reclamation Center and the West Virginia Water Research Institute. He helped develop the Appalachian Clean Streams Program, the Acid Drainage Technology Initiative and the Acid Mine Drainage Policy. He has written extensively on mining issues. Ziemkiewicz serves on numerous boards and advisory committees.

Carl Zipper
Event: Thursday, Tour 1, Almost Level 1: Cutting Down Mountains for Coal

Carl E. Zipper is an associate professor of crop and soil environmental sciences at Virginia Tech. He has been involved with research concerning environmental issues associated with coal mining since 1981. His also explores the intersection of environmental science and natural-resource management and government policy, among other topics. He is director of the Powell River Project, a Virginia Tech program that conducts research to address coal-mine restoration and environmental protection. He serves and/or advises a number of domestic and international groups regarding environmental issues.

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