Who We Are
Staff
Amy Tobin, Executive Director
Michael Anzalone, Director of Events
Lisa Fay Beatty, Production Manager
Kelly Rogala, Sales & Production Assistant
Board of Directors
Peter K. Buckley (Founder, President) initiated the David Brower Center, and has lead as Chairman since its inception. He co-founded the Center for Ecoliteracy in 1995 after a career as CEO of Esprit-Europe and Esprit-International, and an earlier career as an attorney in San Francisco. He is co-founder of Greenwood School, a K-8 school with an environmental emphasis, in Mill Valley, California. He also serves on the boards of Conservation Land Trust and Conservacion Patagonica.
Zenobia Barlow is a cofounder of the Center for Ecoliteracy, and has led the Center’s grantmaking, educational, and publishing programs since its inception. One of the nation’s pioneers in creating models of schooling for sustainability, she has designed strategies for applying ecological and indigenous understanding to K-12 education, including the Food Systems Project, Rethinking School Lunch and Smart by Nature. She co-edited Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (Sierra Club Books) and Ecoliteracy: Mapping the Terrain. Prior to joining the Center, Barlow was editor of an international publishing company, a university program director, and executive director of The Elmwood Institute, an ecological think tank. She travels widely as a documentary photographer.
Adam Berman recently completed his tenure as the Executive Director of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, an eco-spiritual retreat center and community in the Connecticut Berkshires. Adam was also the founding director of ADAMAH: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship. For three years, Adam served as the Director of the Teva Learning Center, the leading Jewish environmental education program in the United States. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Brown University.
Kenneth David Brower is the oldest son of David Brower. His earliest memories are of following his father down various trails in the wild country of the American West. He is a free-lance writer specializing in environmental issues and the outdoors. He is a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, Smithsonian, various National Geographic publications, and other journals. He is the co-author of a half-dozen books and the author of 13 more, among them The Starship and the Canoe, Wake of the Whale, A Song for Satawal, and most recently Freeing Keiko: The Journey of a Killer Whale from ‘Free Willy’ to the Wild.
Chris Desser is a fellow of On the Commons. Her art installation, The Catalog of Extinct Experience, explores extinct and vanishing experiences in the natural world. She served on the California Coastal Commission and the San Francisco Commission for the Environment. In 2003 she co-founded Women’s Voices, Women Vote. She was the director of the Funder’s Working Group on New Technology. She was co-editor of Living with the Genie—Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery. Chris has practiced environmental law and has served on the boards of many companies, foundations and progressive non-profits including Women Donors Network, The Rockwood Leadership Program, Patagonia, Mother Jones Magazine, and the Rainforest Action Network.
Juliet Ellis is the Executive Director of Urban Habitat. Prior to Urban Habitat, Juliet was the Associate Program Officer for Neighborhood and Community Development at The San Francisco Foundation. She was responsible for all aspects of grantmaking in the areas of workforce development, housing, homelessness, economic development, community development, and neighborhood planning. Juliet serves on the boards of the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition, the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, the Capital Community Investment Initiative, Girls After School Academy, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the Partnership for Working Families.
John Flores (Treasurer) has 30 years of administrative and managerial experience in municipal government. As City Manager of the city of Emeryville for 19 years, he was prominent in the long- and short-term planning of the city’s future and instrumental in the redevelopment and cleanup of numerous toxic sites in that city. He was previously with the city of Oakland for 11 years, serving in increasingly responsible administrative roles leading to the position of Deputy City Manager. John has a masters degree in public administration from Golden Gate University and an undergraduate degree in social science from San Jose State University. In his retirement, John is active on several nonprofit boards in his favorite fields of education, environment, and the arts.
Randall Hayes, founder of the Rainforest Action Network, works from the U.S. as a climate policy officer at the World Future Council. Based in Hamburg, Germany, the World Future Council is a global forum composed of 50 respected individuals from around the world championing the rights of future generations and working to ensure that humanity acts now for a sustainable future. Hayes, a filmmaker in the 1980s, is a veteran of many high-visibility corporate accountability campaigns and has advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples throughout the world. He served for five years as president of the City of San Francisco Commission on the Environment, and for two-and-a-half years as director of sustainability in the office of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. He also spent four years working at the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based think tank tasked with analyzing the cultural, social, political and environmental impacts of economic globalization.
John A. Knox (Secretary) is Co-Executive Director of Earth Island Institute. He began with Earth Island Institute as a volunteer in 1984, and began serving as Executive Director in 1985. Having begun his environmental work at Friends of the Earth in the early '80s, John has had a key role in consolidating and expanding Earth Island's unique organizational model for growing an environmental leadership, integrating public education and membership building with project development/sponsorship and youth leadership support. John received his B.A. degree in psychology from Antioch College in Ohio.
David W. Orr is professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. At Oberlin, he directed a collaboration of students, staff members and some of the most innovative designers and architects in the world. Together they designed and built the Environmental Studies Center, a building selected as one of 30 “milestone buildings in the 20th century” by the U.S. Department of Energy. He is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The Campus and Environmental Responsibility.
David Phillips is a biologist and Co-Executive Director of the Earth Island Institute. He has served in that capacity since 1985. David specializes in international marine wildlife conservation, directing the Institute’s International Marine Mammal Project, with staff in the US, Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ivory Coast and Italy. In 1995, David founded the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, successfully overseeing an ambitious international campaign to attempt the first rescue, rehabilitation and release of an orca whale to its native habitat in Iceland. Mr. Phillips was a cum laude graduate in biology from Colorado College.
Nina Simons is Co-Executive Director of Bioneers (Collective Heritage Institute), where she has been co-producing the Bioneers Conference and growing their diverse communications strategies and organizing networks since 1990. Her prior social entrepreneurship includes serving first as marketing director and later as president of Seeds of Change, the organic biodiverse garden seed company, developing it into a national brand in a scant five years. She teaches and lectures on Businesses as Living Systems and Cultivating Women’s Leadership, and was named an Utne Reader “Visionary” in 1996 for her innovative work in communication, community-building and ethical commerce.
Nancy Skinner was recently elected to the California State Assembly and the East Bay Regional Park District. She is an energy and climate change expert currently working with local and national groups to stop the construction of new coal fired power plants. She served as US Director of The Climate Group, is a founder of the International Council for Local Environment Initiatives (ICLEI) and headed ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection Campaign from 1994 to 2004. She has been a keynote speaker at many national and international forums including the Local Government Session at the 2003 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.