Board

Betsy Taylor, Board Co-Chair

Betsy Taylor is the President of Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions. She is the founder and former President of the Center for a New American Dream; Co-founder and Board President of 1Sky Education Fund; Board member of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), Town Creek Foundation, Ottinger Foundation, and Garrison Institute; and former Executive Director for the Merck Family Fund, Stern Fund, and Ottinger Foundation. Betsy is the author of What Kids Really Want that Money Can’t Buy  and co-editor of Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century. She received her M.P.A. from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and her B.A. in psychology from Duke University.

Mark Valentine, Board Co-Chair

Mark Valentine is the founder of Reframe It Consulting and the former Director of Cross-Cutting Initiatives at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He serves as board chair of Resource Media and as an advisory board member of the San Francisco Green Film Festival. Mark received his B.A. in English and History from Union College.

Alan Balch, Board Treasurer

Alan Balch is Vice-President of the Preventive Health Partnership between the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Diabetes Association. He is former Executive Director of Friends of Cancer Research and a Course Instructor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alan received his Ph.D in Environmental Studies from the University of California/Santa Cruz and his M.S. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Texas.

Liz Barratt-Brown

Liz Barratt-Brown is Senior Attorney in the International Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the former President of Oikos Group. Together with U.S. and British Columbia environmentalists, she crafted a “markets” campaign to enlist buyers of old growth forest products, most notably retail giant Home Depot, to help protect 5 million acres of forest on B.C.’s coast, otherwise known as “The Great Bear Rainforest”. Liz represented NRDC at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and in negotiations leading up to the adoption of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio. She also served as a legislative aide to Senator Frank Lautenberg working on all the major environmental statutes. With Senator Lautenberg, Liz crafted the nation’s first community right-to-know act on toxic chemicals called the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). She received her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Robert Engelman

Robert Engelman is Executive Director of the Worldwatch Institute. He is author of the book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want (2008) and has written dozens of articles about population’s connection to environmental change, economic growth, and civil conflict. Bob is former Vice President for Research at Population Action International, a former newspaper reporter specializing in science and the environment, founding secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and a board member of the Population Resource Center and Nova Institute. He received his M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and his B.A. from the University of Chicago.

  Tim Kasser 
 
Tim Kasser is Professor and Chair of Psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He has authored over 70 scientific articles and book chapters on materialism, values, goals, and quality of life, among other topics. He is also the author of The High Price of Materialism (MIT Press, 2002), co-editor of Psychology and Consumer Culture (APA, 2004) and co-author of Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity (WWF-UK, 2009). Tim spends a good deal of his time working with activist groups that try to protect children from commercialization and that encourage a more “inwardly rich” lifestyle than what is offered by consumerism. He lives with his wife, two sons, and assorted animals in the Western Illinois countryside.

Gay Nicholson

Gay Nicholson is President & CEO of Sustainable Tompkins. She received the Bioneers Changemaker of the Month Award in May 2009. Gay was the 2008 Award Recipient of the The Cornell Tradition’s seventh annual Debra S. Newman ’02 Community Recognition Award for her extensive volunteer efforts in the local community, including her work with Sustainable Tompkins, which she helped create in 2004.

Juliet Schor

Juliet Schor is professor of Sociology at Boston College. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and was formerly on the faculty of Harvard University's Department of Economics. Juliet is the best-selling author of the books Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (2010), Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004), The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1992), The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (1999), and Do Americans Shop Too Much? (2000). She earned her Ph.D in economics at the University of Massachusetts and her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University.

Gus Speth

Gus Speth is Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City. He was Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at Yale where he served as Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from 1999 to 2009. From 1993 to 1999, Gus was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, professor of law at Georgetown University, chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, and senior attorney and cofounder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Throughout his career, Gus has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Publications include The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008),Global Environmental Governance (2006),and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (2004).

Eleanor Sterling

Eleanor Sterling is Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and Director of Graduate Studies and adjunct faculty at Columbia University's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. She received her Ph.D and M.Phil. in Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale University and her B.A. from Yale College.