ENVIRONMENT ON THE BALLOT IN 2024 AND BEYOND

OUR PANELISTS

MODERATOR JACQUELYN SWEARINGEN '73, Ph.D.

Jacquelyn Swearingen is a retired journalist and historian who has written about environmental issues ranging from the conservation of the Florida Everglades to the legacy of atomic war in Hiroshima. She covered international trade and manufacturing for the Detroit News, and Congress, foreign affairs, and federal regulatory issues for the Miami Herald. Her work as an investigative reporter for the Times Union in Albany included reporting on health and environmental justice issues in New York state. While living in Tokyo, she also wrote for the Asian Wall Street Journal and The Japan Times.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Dr. Swearingen taught East Asian and European history, international relations, and an introduction to science and technology studies. She served as the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology. She concentrated in Chinese history at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in Japanese and Chinese history from the University of Chicago.

CALLS TO ACTION:

• Become a regular reader of climate and environmental news
• Subscribe to Climate newsletters like the New York Times’s “Climate Forward” or “Inside Climate News”
• Read books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Use these writings to commit to acting together with state and local groups to protect the land and the creatures around you

JASON CLAY '73, Ph.D.

Senior Vice President, Markets, Executive Director, Markets Institute

World Wildlife Fund

Jason Clay leads the work of WWF-US on Markets and how companies manage supply chains and the Markets Institute whose goal is to identify and create awareness about global issues and trends on the horizon for food and soft commodities and then build consensus about how to best anticipate them. Dr. Clay launched WWF’s work on agriculture, livestock, aquaculture, finance and reshaped our work with the private sector and on fisheries. During his career he has worked on a family farm and in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; taught at Harvard and Yale; and spent more than 35 years working in human rights and environmental organizations.

Dr. Clay is the author of 20 books, more than 500 articles and 1,000 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Aquaculture and the Environment, Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia, and World Agriculture and the Environment. In addition to his role at WWF, Dr. Clay is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability. Dr. Clay was awarded Tuft University’s Jean Mayer Global Humanitarian Award in 2013.

Dr. Clay studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics before receiving a Ph.D. in anthropology and international agriculture from Cornell University.

CALL TO ACTION

• Eat food that is in season, use smaller plates, take smaller portions, use leftovers for meals, and make one day a week meatless.

BOB DREHER '73, M.A., J.D.

Legal Director, Potomac Riverkeeper Network

Bob has spent his legal career focusing on environmental and natural resources matters, working in government, with environmental groups, in private practice, and teaching. Bob served in the Obama administration as Associate Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Acting Assistant Attorney General for Environment and Natural Resources for the U.S. Department of Justice, and in the Clinton administration as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He represented environmental organizations and tribes as managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Washington, D.C. office, counseled businesses in private practice with the firm Troutman Sanders, LLC, and served as Deputy Executive Director of the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute. From 2016 to 2020, Bob served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Defenders of Wildlife, with responsibility for all of Defenders’ programs for wildlife conservation, and later served as the Potomac Riverkeeper Network’s Legal Director before retiring this fall. Bob graduated from Harvard College, and holds a master’s degree from Brown University and a law degree from Yale Law School.

CALL TO ACTION

• Focus renewed environmental advocacy on our state governments and legislatures to protect our air, water, and land and fill the gaps left in federal environmental laws by a hyper-conservative Supreme Court.

JAMES ENGELL '73, P.h.D.

Gurney Research Professor of English Literature

Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard

From 1978 through 2024 James Engell taught at Harvard, chairing the Department of English from 2004 to 2010 and again during Covid 2020-2021. He earlier chaired the Degree Program in History & Literature as well as the Department of Comparative Literature. He served on the Committee on the Study of Religion. A faculty associate of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he taught environmental courses at Harvard (including in its Advanced Leadership Initiative), the National Humanities Center, and Waseda University. He was a leader in the successful divestment movement at Harvard. His HarvardX online course on rhetoric and public speaking has enrolled more than 750,000 learners. He served on the inaugural faculty advisory committee of the Salata Institute, as well as on its subcommittee for solar geoengineering.

In 2008 Yale University Press published Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, which he conceived and co-edited. He has authored book chapters and articles related to climate and environmental education. His other books include The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981); The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999); with Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), which won the 2007 Association of American Colleges & Universities Ness Book Award for best book on liberal education; and with Michael D. Raymond, an illustrated edition (2016), newly edited from the manuscripts, of William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem of consciousness, politics, and the natural world, The Prelude (1805), which enjoys a second edition with Brandeis University Press in 2024. In 2024 he won the Harvard Magazine Smith-Weld prize for writing on higher education, awarded for “Humanists All” in the January-February 2023 issue.

CALLS TO ACTION

• First, make sure you’re registered, inform yourself about the environmental positions of all candidates, and then vote!
• Second, join a local or national group promoting government policies that ensure a clean and improving environment
• Third, take advantage of significant federal tax credits that you may be eligible for, for example improving insulation in your home or installing a heat pump.

W. JOHN KRESS '73, P.h.D.

Distinguished Scientist and Curator Emeritus,

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Dr. W. John Kress is Distinguished Scientist and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He was Curator of Botany for over thirty years and formerly served as the Interim Under Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian and Director of Science in the Grand Challenges Consortia at the institution. He is currently Co-Chair of the Earth BioGenome Project, an international effort to generate complete genomes for all species of plants, animals, and fungi on the planet. Dr. Kress received his education at Harvard University (B.A., 1973) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1981), where he studied tropical biology, ethnobotany, evolution, and ecology. His taxonomic work on the Zingiberales, a group of tropical plants that includes gingers, bananas, and heliconias, has taken him around the world collecting plants and discovering new species. Dr. Kress was instrumental in developing the genetic tool known as “DNA barcoding” for plants, which allows the accurate identification of plant species using a short, universal segment of DNA sequence. His current research is focused on biodiversity genomics, conservation, and the Anthropocene. Among his over 250 scientific and popular papers are his books Plant Conservation – A Natural History Approach, The Weeping Goldsmith, The Art of Plant Evolution, Botanica Magnifica, and The Ornaments of Life - Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics. His most recent book is Living in the Anthropocene – Earth in the Age of Humans about climate change and society. Dr. Kress is currently writing The Smithsonian Guide to Trees of North America to be published by Yale University Press, which will be published in October 2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Parker-Gentry Award for Biodiversity and Conservation from the Field Museum of Natural History and the Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award. As well as serving as Affiliate Faculty at George Mason University, he is Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. He lives in Dorset, Vermont, with his wife Lindsay L. Clarkson, MD.

CALL TO ACTION

• Immediately begin work with like-minded neighbors and residents of your state to enact legislation that protects 30% of your land by the year 2023 and 50% by the year 2050, if not sooner. The need to connect  these local efforts to global initiatives could not be more critical.

ANNE MACKINNON '73, J.D., P.h.D.

Author, “Public Waters: Lessons from Wyoming for the American West”

U.New Mexico Press 2021

Anne MacKinnon has been a journalist in Wyoming since 1979. She covered energy and environment in a state whose revenues have long depended on coal, oil and gas production; she soon became fascinated with how scarce water is divided up in Western states. She has taught natural resource policy courses for the University of Wyoming on energy and water issues, and consulted for Wyoming state government on Colorado River issues. In 2021 she published a book on Wyoming water law and management and its lessons for other Western states. She holds a JD from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Natural Resource Economics from Humboldt University in Berlin.

CALL TO ACTION

• Check the positions of candidates for everything from school board to City and county to state legislatures to Congress, on issues in their bailiwick: running from climate change education to land use, staffing for environmental agencies, the future of NEPA and support and funding for the decisions to be made on the Colorado River. Then tell your friends and together get out the vote!

CALL TO ACTION

• Global Environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change together constitute one of the biggest political issues of this election and of our times. Yet the rhetoric of most candidates running for office at all levels puts these issues in the background. We are calling for all of our classmates to make sure that their environmental concerns rise to the top of their agendas in 2024 and are clearly expressed to those running for office.