Southwest
Leopold Conference
...............................
The Aldo Leopold
Foundation
P.O.Box 77
Baraboo, WI 53913
608.355.0279
608.356.7309 fax
mail@aldoleopold.org
Colloquium Speakers
Cyndie Abeyta
(Albuquerque)
Middle Rio Grande coordinator/hydrologist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Cyndie manages the Middle Rio Grande Bosque Initiative, working with numerous agencies, communities, stakeholders, and concerned citizens to protecti, enhance and restore ecosystem function. She also manages and conducts hydrologic investigations and provides technical guidance on the hydrology of the Rio Grande. From 1978 to 2000 she was a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, working on coal-mine and power generation facilities and leading a technical team investigating water resources of various areas of the world. She is author of numerous scientific reports and received the USDI Manuel Lujan Jr. Champions award in 2006 for her work in areas that impact communities.
Clara Apodaca
(Albuquerque)
President and CEO, National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation. A former First Lady of New Mexico (1975-1978) she also served as the cultural affairs officer for the state of New Mexico (1984-87). She spent eighteen years in various posts in Washington, D.C. before accepting the position heading the NHCC Foundation in 2006. A native of Doña Ana, New Mexico, she was educated at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Since she founded the Governor’s Gallery in the New Mexico statehouse, she has been a dedicated promoter of the arts. Under her direction the foundation has achieved unprecedented success. Clara was selected as one of 100 Influentials by Hispanic Magazine in 2008.
Anthony Anella
(Albuquerque)
Principal of Anthony Anella Architect AIA, an award-winning practice dedicated to conservation-based design and planning., and co-chair of the Aldo Leopold Centennial Celebration. He was also a partner in the limited development of the Montosa Ranch, which succeeded in protecting over 30,000 acres with one of the largest conservation easements in the history of the United States, and he received a 2003 Citation Award for the project from the Western Mountain Region of the American Institute of Architects. With a B.A. in history from Dartmouth and architecture training at Washington University and the University of Colorado, Anella is author of several books, including Never Say Good-bye: The Albuquerque Re-photographic Project (Albuquerque Museum, 2000) and Saving the Ranch: Conservation easement Design in the American West (Island Press, 2004).
Estevan Arellano
(Embudo, NM)
Poet-writer-photographer-farmer and community leader, with interest also in the history of the Luna family, into which Aldo Leopold married. With training in journalism and communications, Estevan has devoted most of his life to documenting the traditional knowledge of the Indo-Hispano in northern New Mexico, especially as it relates to land and water. A visiting research fellow in the UNM School of Architeture, he has published several books of poetry, photography and history, including Ancient Agriculture, a translation of a 1513 Spanish text (Gibbs Smith, 2006) and, with Enrique LaMadrid, Juan del Oso, John the Bear and Water of Life (UNM Press, 1008), a bilingual children’s book.
Richard Bartlett
(Dallas)
Vice Chairman of Mary Kay Inc. with interests in land conservation, environmental science and education and president of Thinking Like a Mountain Foundation. Dick has been active in conservation for more than forty years. He has served as a trustee and chairman of The Nature Conservancy of Texas and of New Mexico and has helped conserve more than one million acres in the two states. He is a former chairman of the National Environmental Education Foundation and serves as an advisor to NatureServe, the National Council for Science and the Environment, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the Center for Big Bend Studies. In 2005, he was presented the Texas Legends Award by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. He has authored several books and many articles on business and conservation, including The Sportsman’s Guide to Texas (with his wife Joanne Krieger) and Saving the Best of Texas: A Partnership Approach to Conservation.
Butch Blazer
(Santa Fe)
First Native American (Apache) state forester of New Mexico. Butch has more than twenty-five years of experience with federal and tribal natural resources management programs across the country. In 1983 he helped co-found the Native American Fish & Wildlife Society, a non-profit national organization to assist Tribes and Alaskan Villages establish and maintain viable natural resource management programs on their respective tribal lands, serving as national president from 1996-2000. He chairs the Southwest Tribal Fisheries Commission (SWTFC), and enjoys hunting, skiing and just “hiding-out” in the vast wilderness of his beautiful Mescalero Apache Reservation.
Eloisa Brown
(Albuquerque)
An Albuquerque writer, family historian, and daughter of Robert and Rosina Bergere Brown. She is a cousin to Estella Leopold and Caryl Leopold Smith.
Gregory Cajete
(Albuquerque)
Director of Native American Studies, University of New Mexico, and author of numerous books on Native Americans and environment. Greg is a life-long resident of New Mexico (Santa Clara Pueblo) with a Ph.D. from the International College-Los Angeles. He is associate professor in the UNM College of Education, specializing in design and implementation of culturally responsive science education curricula, and has authored five books and numerous articles related to indigenous perspectives of science and ecology, including Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, A People’s Ecology: Explorations of Sustainable Living, and Spirit of the Game: Wellsprings for Indigenous Education.
Thomas E. Chavez
(Albuquerque)
Historian, author and cultural administrator. With a Ph.D. from UNM, Tom was director of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe for twenty-one years, after which he served for several years as executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. He held a Fulbright research fellowship in Spain and has conducted historical research throughout the US, Mexico, Europe and Argentina. He has published seven books and numerous articles including An Illustrated History of New Mexico (1992, 2002)and New Mexico: Past and Future (2006) and was awarded the Distinguished History Medal from the DAR.
Sally Collins
(Washington, D.C.)
Director of the Office of Ecosystem Services and Marketing, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and former associate chief, U.S. Forest Service. Born in Ames, Iowa and with degrees from the universities of Colorado and Wyoming in outdoor recreation and public administration, Sally has had a twenty-five-year career in the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, including service as supervisor of the Deschutes National Forest, before becoming associate chief of the $5 billion, 30,000-employee USFS in 2001.
Susan Flader
(Columbia, MO)
Professor emerita of U.S. western and environmental history, University of Missouri. With a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford, Susan is a founder and former president of the American Society for Environmental History and a fellow of the Forest History Society. She has published eight books and numerous articles on Aldo Leopold and other environmental topics, including The Sand Country of Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests, and The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. She has served as an officer or director of numerous national and state conservation organizations and has chaired the board of the Aldo Leopold Foundation since 2004.
John Francis
(Pt. Reyes, Calif.)
Founder/author of PlanetWalker: How to Change your World One Step at a Time. The son of working-class African Americans in Philadelphia, John opted out of the petroleum economy in 1971 after a massive oil spill in San Francisco Bay, walking everywhere including the entire US and much of Latin America. Shortly thereafter, he also stopped talking, communicating for seventeen years only through improvised sign language, notes, and his banjo, an experience that transformed his approach to both personal communication and environmental activism. With a Ph.D. in land resources earned during his silence, he wrote oil-spill regulations for the U.S. Coast Guard and was named a United Nations goodwill ambassador to the world’s grassroots communities by Maurice Strong.
Albino Garcia
(Albuquerque South Valley)
Chicano/Native activist and founder of La Plazita Institute to pull at-risk youth off the street and into community, including working at Sanchez Farm. Growing up in Chicago, he was kicked out of twelve schools and locked up for drug possession and assault. When a judge gave him a choice between more prison and the military, he chose the military and eventually entered healing relationships with spiritual elders from his own Aztec and Apache heritage. He began counseling youths in Los Angeles gangs, then training counselors and school administrators in his innovative techniques. He moved to Albuquerque eight years ago and founded La Plazita, a support network of organizations and schools that serve youth and the community as a whole. He currently works with Albuquerque High School and has a La Plazita “campus” at Sanchez Farm in the Armijo neighborhood in South Valley.
Drum Hadley
(Douglas, AZ)
Rancher, poet and founder of the Malpais Borderlands Group. Drum is a long-time poet in the generation of Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg who moved to Guadalupe Canyon Ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border. Here he and his family started the Animas Foundation in order to purchase and manage the huge Gray Ranch saved from subdivision by the Nature Conservancy. With Bill McDonald and others he founded the Malpai Borderlands Group, a non-profit organization composed of ranchers, scientists and other stakeholders to create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape and support a flourishing community of human, plant and animal life in the borderlands region. Drum has a recent collection of poems, Voice of the Borderlands (Rio Nuevo, 2005).
LaDonna Harris
(Albuquerque)
Founder and president, Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO). A Comanche, LaDonna Harris was raised on a farm near Walters, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression and began public service as the wife of U.S. Senator Fred Harris. She founded Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity in the 1960s and AIO in the 1970s, and helped found the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, the National Tribal Environmental Council, Common Cause, and the National Urban Coalition, among other organizations. She has served on numerous Presidential commissions, has represented the United States in UNESCO, and was a candidate for vice-president on the Citizens Party ticket with Barry Commoner in 1980. She was instrumental in the return of the Taos Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo and in helping the Menominee Tribe regain their reservation status.
Buddy Huffaker
(Baraboo, WI)
Executive director, Aldo Leopold Foundation. Buddy has a master’s in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois and a certificate in not-for-profit management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He began at the Leopold Foundation as an intern in 1996 and became executive director in 1999, overseeing the growth of the organization from a staff of 1.5 FTE and a budget of less than $100,000 to a staff of 12 FTE today with a budget of $1 million. He also led an $8.6 million capital campaign to protect and restore the Leopold shack, farm and archives and build a headquarters/visitor center that in 2007 was awarded LEED-platinum certification as the greenest building in the world and the first ever to be certified carbon neutral.
Paul Johnson
(Decorah, Iowa)
Paul Johnson is a wildlife biologist and former chief of the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service). Johnson, an Iowa farmer, helped to found the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in 1987. Concerned about farming practices that were affecting surface and groundwater, Paul Johnson put forth the idea of a center to promote sustainable farming practices while serving in the Iowa state legislature. He subsequently served as director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
Estella Leopold
(Seattle)
Professor of paleobotany emerita, University of Washington, and daughter of Aldo and Estella Leopold. With a Ph.D. in plant sciences (palynology/paleobotany) from Yale in 1956, Estella had a distinguished two-decade career as a research botanist in the U.S. Geological Survey, winning election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. She became director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington n 1976, serving as professor of botany and environmental studies until becoming emerita in 2000. She has published more than a hundred scholarly articles, served as president of the AAAS Pacific Division, the American Quaternary Association and the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and won many professional and conservation awards.
Gene Likens
(Milbrook, New York)
Gene Likens is the founding director and president emeritus of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies at Millbrook, NY and has taught at Dartmouth College, Yale University and other institutions. He was the co-founder in 1963 of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, which has shed light on critical links between ecosystem function and land-use practices. He and his colleagues were the first scientists to discover acid rain and to document the link between the combustion of fossil fuels and an increase in the acidity of precipitation in North America. His findings have influenced public policy, guided and motivated scientific studies, and increased public awareness of human-accelerated environmental change. Among other honors, Dr. Likens has been elected to the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences and been awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor, and the Blue Planet Prize for outstanding scientific research that helps to solve global environmental problems.
Ariel Lugo
(San Juan, Puerto Rico)
U.S. Forest Service ecologist and director of the International Institute for Tropical Forestry, with special interest in global climate change. Born in Puerto Rico, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He worked in planning and resource analysis with the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources before joining the Forest Service. He has over four hundred scientific publications and has served as president of the Association for Tropical Biology, founding member of the Society for Ecological Restoration, and chairman of the Man and the Biosphere Directorate for Tropical Forest Ecosystems. He has a special interest in global climate change and frequently appears as an expert witness in federal court cases on environmental issues.
Bill McDonald
(Douglas, AZ)
Rancher and executive director of the Malpais Borderlands Group, a coalition of ranchers and scientists dedicated to “boundaryless” land stewardship. Bill is a fifth-generation rancher on his family's 102-year-old ranch in southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico. . He has held leadership positions in local and statewide cattle growers' associations in Arizona and spent twenty-five years as a supervisor of a Natural Resource Conservation District. His awards include Arizona Association of Conservation Districts' Outstanding Supervisor, Arizona Game and Fish Commission's Outstanding Wildlife Habitat Steward, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Curt Meine
(Prairie du Sac, WI)
Senior fellow, Aldo Leopold Foundation, and director of history and conservation biology, Center for Humans and Nature, Chicago. With a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Curt published the first full-length biography of Aldo Leopold and is frequently called on to interpret Leopold’s life and work to professional and public audiences. He works also as a conservation biologist, with extensive experience in the American Southwest as well as overseas, including many years with the International Crane Foundation. Among his many books and articles in addition to his Leopold biography are The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, and Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold and Conservation. His work has been recognized by awards from the Center for Western Regional Studies, the American Public Works Association, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Forest History Society, the Bay and Paul Foundations, and the Quivira Coalition.
Bruce Milne
(Albuquerque)
Professor of biology and director, University of New Mexico Sustainability Studies Program, with special interest in local food systems. Bruce has degrees from the State University of New York-Albany and Rutgers and served as a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Design before joining the UNM faculty. He has published numerous scientific papers on landscape ecology and has special interests in landscape-level hydrological research on river networks and in local food systems. He won the International Association of Landscape Ecology’s Distinguished Landscape Ecologist award in 2006, and serves as a member of the steering committee for the Leopold Centennial 2009.
Ramona Montoya
(Isleta, N.M.)
Natural Resources Department, Pueblo of Isleta, and scholar of Native American studies and land resources. Ramona, a native of Isleta and San Felipe Pueblos, calls herself a “descendent of Indian poachers,” in reference to a comment once made by Aldo Leopold. She has degrees from the University of Idaho and Johns Hopkins and has also studied at the University of Wisconsin. She has taught at the University of New Mexico and has a high-school textbook in environmental science currently in press.
Milford Muskett
(Seattle)
Navajo historian and professor of Intra-American studies, Shoreline Community College, Seattle, with interest in Navajo environmental ethics. Milford has a Ph.D. in land resources from the University of Wisconsin and served as assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and American Indian Studies at Cornell University before joining the faculty of Shoreline Community College. He has served as an Environmental Leadership Program Fellow and has a special interest in Navajo environmental ethics.
Gary Paul Nabhan
(Tucson, Ariz.)
Professor and research social scientist, Southwest Center, University of Arizona-Tucson. Gary is a Lebanese-American ecologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He has published two dozen books of literary and science writing, including several dealing with landscape and cultural traditions and values in the American Southwest and the Middle East, translated into five languages. He lectures frequently in Latin American, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. and is founding director of the Center for Sustainable Environments, Northern Arizona University, and of Renewing America’s Food Traditions Initiative, Slow Food U.S.A. He has won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology. Among his recent books are Arab-American: Landscape, Culture and Cuisine in Two Deserts, Heritage Farming in the SW Borderlands, Five Ways to Value Western Landscapes, and Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity.
Miguel Santistevan
(Taos, N.M.)
Agricultural ecologist, with special interest in native maize varieties and acequia systems. Miguel’s research interest is in crop diversity and ecology of the acequia and dryland agricultural systems in northern New Mexico and the greater Southwest. He is a youth mentor/media producer for The New Mexico Acequia Association for a project called “Sembrando Semillas” and a radio show called “¡Que Vivan las Acequias!” He has an M.S. in Ecology from the University of California-Davis and maintains a small experimental seed-saving adaptation and demonstration farm in Taos called Sol Feliz. He is certified in permaculture and ZERI Design and is actively involved in environmental education for schools and land restoration efforts.
Dan Shilling
(Phoenix)
Adjunct professor at Arizona State University and principal, Community Heritage Group. With a Ph.D. in literature and rhetoric from Arizona State University, he spent nearly two decades at the Arizona Humanities Council, the last fourteen years as director, during which time he developed numerous public programs in collaboration with civic organizations, one of which, “Voices from Communities in Transition,” resulted in an anthology, Voices: Conversations on Community, and was awarded the Schwartz Prize. He has recently published Civic Tourism: the Poetry and Politics of Place, and he is coordinating an NEH summer institute for college faculty in 2009 on “A Fierce Green Fire at 100: Aldo Leopold and the Roots of Environmental Ethics.”
Caryl Leopold Smith
(Brighton, Iowa)
Caryl is the daughter of Carl and Dolores Bergere Leopold (brother and sister of Aldo and his wife Estella) and is an Iowa organic farmer and family historian.
Cipriano Vigil
(El Rito, N.M.)
Traditional Hispano folk musician and ethnomusicologist, performing with his son Cipriano Jr. and his daughter Felcita Pinon. Cipriano, who grew up in the mountainous ranching and farming community of Chamisal in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is a celebrated performer in the nueva canción folk tradition, which originated in Latin America and is related to U.S. protest and labor songs. In addition, he is a living icon of traditional nuevomexicano music learned from previous generations at village rituals, such as dances and weddings, that celebrate the cycle of life and bind families and neighbors together. He has performed music from his colonial Hispanic heritage, as well as his own compositions, at venues such as the American Folklife Festival and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and his songs were integral to the musical score for Robert Redford’s film The Milagro Beanfield War (1988). With a Ph.D. in musicology, he teaches at Northern New Mexico Community College and serves also as a storyteller and recording artist.
Carlos Vasquez
(Albuquerque)
Director of History and Literary Arts, National Hispanic Cultural Center. Holding an M.A. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from UCLA, Carlos taught for many years at UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Cal State and the University of New Mexico before joining the staff of the National Hispanic Cultural Center prior to its official opening in 2000; he served six years on the NHCC planning committee. For four years he directed Jardines del Bosque Research Station, a summer program for high school students who studied environmental arts and sciences and did restoration work in the Rio Grande bosque. Among his recent publications are La Vida del Rio Grande: Our River Our Life and Healing Plants of the Rio Grande Valley: Hispano and Pueblo Uses of Nature.
Courtney White
(Santa Fe)
Co-founder and executive director of the Quivira Coalition, devoted to restoration of ecosystem health on working ranches and forests of the Southwest. Courtney is a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who voluntarily dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to co-found the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists and others. His writing, including “The Working Wilderness: A Call for a Land Health Movement,” has been published in numerous magazines and books. Among his recent books are Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West and, with Richard Knight, Conservation for a New Generation.