associate professor and chair in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Middleton’s research centers on Native environmental policy and Native activism for site protection using conservation tools. Her books Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (2011) and Upstream (2018) focus on Native applications of conservation easements and on the history of Indian allotment lands at the headwaters of the California State Water Project, respectively. Middleton is currently developing projects focused on tribal participation in the carbon market, on California Indigenous legal history, and on intersecting Afro- and Indigenous Caribbean histories. She is passionate about increasing under-represented perspectives, especially Indigenous perspectives, in academia and in environmental policy and planning.
Paul Mohaiis a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research. He is a founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan and a major contributor to the growing body of quantitative research examining disproportionate environmental burdens and their impacts on low-income and people-of-color communities. He has served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and has provided testimony on environmental justice to the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. He is author of numerous articles, books, and reports focused on race and the environment.
Rachel Morello-Froschis a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. As an environmental health scientist and epidemiologist, Morello-Frosch conducts research that examines race and class determinants of environmental health disparities among diverse communities in the United States with a focus on climate change and environmental chemicals. She also writes about the influence of community-based participatory research projects on environmental health science, regulation, and policymaking. She is the co-author of numerous books and articles. Her awards include the Chancellor’s Award for Research in Public Service, University of California, Berkeley (2012), and the Damu Smith Environmental Health Achievement Award, Environment Section, American Public Health Association (2010).
Kari Marie Norgaardis professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. Over the past 15 years, Norgaard has published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, Indigenous environmental justice, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, and sociology of emotions. She is the author of Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action (2019) and Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (2011) and a recipient of the Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award, a Sociology of Emotions Recent Contribution Award, and the Pacific Sociological Association’s Distinguished Practice Award. Her work on climate denial and Indigenous environmental justice have been covered by The Washington Post, National Geographic, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, High Country News, and Yes Magazine, among others.
David N. Pellowis the Dehlsen Chair and professor of environmental studies and director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and research focus on ecological justice issues in the United States and globally. His books include What Is Critical Environmental Justice?; Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. He has served on the boards of directors for Global Response, The Global Action Research Center, the Center for Urban Transformation, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers.
Kaitlin Reed(Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is an assistant professor of Native American studies at Humboldt State University. Her research is focused on tribal land and water rights, extractive capitalism, and settler colonial political economies. She is currently working on a book titled From Gold Rush to Green Rush: Cannabis and California Indians. This book connects the historical and ecological dots between the Gold Rush and the Green Rush, focusing on capitalistic resource extraction and violence against Indigenous lands and bodies. In 2018, she was awarded the Charles Eastman Fellowship of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. Reed is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe in Northwestern California.
Sarah M. Riosis an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Rios received a doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2018. Rios's ongoing research examines how farmworkers and former prisoners elucidated new ways of knowing about an environmental disease known as Valley Fever, its connection to cumulative vulnerabilities, and new ways of healing from its devastating effects. Rios is especially interested in how poverty, pollution, and prisons lead to health problems, and how community-based knowledge can address and redress cumulative health impacts. Over the next few years, her studies will develop a broad framework that sheds light on community-based knowledge and variations of community-based research methods to further explore the links among race, place, and health.
Oday Salimis a clinical assistant professor of law and director of the Environmental Law & Sustainability Clinic, as well as an attorney at the National Wildlife Federation in its Great Lakes Regional Center. Prior to joining the clinical program, Salim practiced environmental law in Pennsylvania and Michigan, focusing on stormwater management, water quality permitting, water rights, environmental justice, land use and zoning, utility regulation, mineral rights, and renewable energy. He has litigated in administrative and civil courts at the local, state, and federal levels, and has done transactional work for individuals and nonprofits. In 2018, he was named one of Grist magazine’s 50 Fixers for his work on environmental and public health protection in minority communities.
João Costa Vargasis a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. His work is based on collaborative projects engaging antiblackness in the United States and in Brazil. He has published, among other books, Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles (2006), Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (2008), and The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (2018).
Ingrid Waldronis an associate professor in the Faculty of Health and the team co-lead of the Health of People of African Descent Research Cluster at the Healthy Populations Institute at Dalhousie University. Waldron’s scholarship is driven by a long-standing interest in looking at the many ways in which spaces and places are organized by structures of colonialism and gendered racial capitalism. She is the director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project, which is investigating the socioeconomic and health effects of environmental racism in Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities. Her first book, There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, received the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing. The 2019 documentary There’s Something in the Water is based on Waldron’s book and was co-produced by Waldron, Ellen Page, Ian Daniel, and Julia Sanderson.
Kyle Powys Whyteis the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University, professor of philosophy and community sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration and the Geocognition Research Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Whyte’s work focuses on climate and environmental justice and Indigenous environmental studies, most recently studying issues related to Indigenous food sovereignty and Indigenous critiques of concepts of the anthropocene. His writing appears in journals such as Climatic Change, Sustainability Science, and Human Ecology. He is the recipient of several awards including the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2009, and the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice in 2015.
Stephen Zavestoskiis a professor of environmental studies at the University of San Francisco. He has co-edited books such as Social Movements in Health (2005), Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements (2012), and Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices and Problems (2014). He is also
