Environmental Protection in America: Reviewing the Past and Looking Ahead to the Future of Nature

OUR PANELISTS 

MODERATOR W. JOHN KRESS '73, Ph.D

Distinguished Scientist and Curator Emeritus,

National Museum of Natural History

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. 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 documenting plant life 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. He was one of the founders of the Earth BioGenome Project and served as Co-Chair for five years. His research has been focused on plant evolution, biodiversity conservation, and the Anthropocene. Among his over 300 scientific and popular papers are his books   Plant Conservation – A Natural History Approach, The Weeping Goldsmith, The Art of Plant Evolution, Botanica Magnifica, The Ornaments of Life - Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics, and Living in the Anthropocene – Earth in the Age of Humans. Dr. Kress recently completed Smithsonian Trees of North America published by Yale University Press in the Fall of 2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received the Parker-Gentry Award for Biodiversity and Conservation from the Field Museum of Natural History, the Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award, and the Peter H. Raven Award for public understanding of science. As well as serving as Affiliate Faculty at George Mason University, he was a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Dr. Kress lives in Dorset, Vermont, with his wife Lindsay L. Clarkson, MD.

Call to Action:

• Do not forget about the environment in this age of rampant distraction.
• • What is there not distracting us this day from environmental stuff? The preservation of life on our planet is really why we're fighting to succeed here, and as we are confronted by political insanity, by economic catastrophe and forever wars, and our standard of living is challenged by runaway capitalism, as we are threatened with the possible decline of democracy, which you've all just been talking about, and as we need to do everything we can to ensure a free and legitimate election in November, if not before, do not forget about our commitment to the conservation of nature and the environment.

JASON CLAY '73, Ph.D

Senior Vice President of Markets

Executive Director of the Markets Institute, World Wildlife Fund

LinkedIn

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JASON CLAY, PhD, is the Senior Vice President for Markets & Food at WWF where he helps identify and address emerging global issues, trends, and tools impacting conservation in more timely, cost-effective, and scalable ways. His career includes running a family farm, working for the USDA; teaching at Cornell, Harvard and Yale and spending 45 years working with human rights and environmental NGOs. He currently leads WWF-US efforts to improve private sector supply chain management and help producers address their most significant impacts. He has launched the multi-year proof of concept for Codex Planetarius, a set of minimum global standards to reduce the key impacts of globally traded food commodities; is testing “The 1% Solution,” an environmental fee to help producers become legal and reduce their key impacts; and is working with the global leather industry to support the creation of a DCF leather fund. He studied anthropology and international agriculture at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Cornell, where he earned a PhD. He has written more than 20 books, 500 papers and given more than 2,500 invited lectures.

Calls to Action:

• Make careful selections [in terms of consumption] and understand what those mean.

• Even as we're fighting for environmental protection in America, we need to make sure that where we buy our food from abroad has environmental protections in place as well, and it [currently] doesn’t. We're telling Brazil what they shouldn't be doing, [even though we ourselves] have done it in the past, and we haven't made a clear case on why they're going to pay for [their current lack of environmental protections] in the future. We're going to see a dust storm in Brazil within 5 years which will make the Dust Bowl in the U.S. look kind of minor by comparison. So, I do think that we need to get people more informed in order to get involved.

• Put the science to work in your daily life.

JOHN MCNEILL, Ph.D

Professor, Georgetown University

J.R. McNeill, Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University, has authored or edited more than 20 books, including Something New Under the Sun, listed by the London Times among the 10 best science books ever written (despite being a history book); and Mosquito Empires, which won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association; and a world history textbook, The Webs of Humankind (2 vols.).  He is a former president of both the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association, an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europaea; a member of the Académie Royale du Maroc.  In 2018 he received the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.  His main research interest is environmental history.

Calls to Action:

• My call to action on the policy level is: electrify everything. I as a historian look at the way that we globally and in the United States have gotten into the mess that we're in, and I think that the energy system created 250 years ago then consolidated in the 20th century is the biggest reason [for that mess]. So, electrify everything, [although] I recognize there are limits to that. Agriculture's gonna be a huge lift, as Jason has told us. 

• Eat less livestock.

NAOMI ORESKES, Ph.D

Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

Bluesky

LinkedIn

Internationally renowned earth scientist, science historian, and author, NAOMI ORESKES is the Henry Charles Lea professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. She received a BSc in mining geology from the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College in London and an interdisciplinary PhD in geological research and the history of science from Stanford University. She worked as an exploration geologist in the Australian outback and spent 15 years at the University of California, San Diego before joining the Harvard faculty in 2013. Oreskes is the author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including the best-selling Merchants of Doubt, which was made into a documentary film by Participant Media.  For the past decade, she has been primarily interested in the science and politics of anthropogenic climate change. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, and her Ted Talk, Why We Should Trust Scientists, has over 1,600,000 views, and is the 2025 recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize.

Calls to Action:

• All the people who kind of care about [climate change], but don't really know why it matters, we need to make clear to them why it matters, why it matters now, not in 2050, and why we need to make it a priority in our political choices, because if we don't, we're all going to be paying the price.

• I teach a class at Harvard called Life and Death in the Anthropocene. I teach The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh…. [and] I had a question on my final exam based on a guest lecture we had from Gidon Eshel, who teaches at Bard College and is a world expert on the environmental impacts of food system, and the question in the final exam was: Gidon Eshel says the solution to the problem of the Anthropocene is hummus. Discuss.
• • You can't solve all the problems by changing how you eat, but you actually can do a tremendous amount, and that's something that is in our capacity to do, while we also make sure that we preserve fair and safe and free elections.
  • The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh, The University of Chicago Press 
  • Planetary Eating: The Hidden Links between Your Plate and Our Cosmic Neighborhood, Gidon Eshel, MIT Press 

SHARON S. TISHER '73, J.D.

Emerita Lecturer, University of Maine

Sharon Tisher is an emerita lecturer at the University of Maine, where she has taught for 30 years: the core humanities "Civilizations" sequence and a variety of tutorials in the Honors College, and environmental law and policy courses in the Ecology and Environmental Sciences program. She has chaired the boards of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners' Association, the Orono Land Trust, and the Urban League of Greater Hartford. As a member of Al Gore's Climate Reality Leadership Corps, she has given her version of the Inconvenient Truth lecture to over 1000 people in Maine. She has been a frequent opinion columnist in Maine on environmental issues, and in 2012 created the UMaine website A Climate Chronology, updated every year. It is a 450-page searchable color-coded record of events in climate science, U.S. policy and international policy, starting in 1824. With references and web links to documents, news, and commentary, it is intended as a springboard for research, contemplation, and action. Before transitioning to academia, she practiced trial law for 15 years with Day, Berry and Howard in Hartford. She was the firm's first woman partner. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Call to Action:

• Fair elections, particularly the [2026] midterm elections, are extremely important…I read that there is a possibility of getting a majority in each house. Then there would be no more Trump administration final regulations, because there's something called the Congressional Review Act, [which says that] by a mere majority vote in each of the House, any regulation passed can be basically vetoed by Congress. Write and call your senators and gather other people to do this to oppose the SAVE suite of bills.