New Directions in Environmental Law Conference

Paul Todd

Paul Todd is a Senior Attorney for Global Biodiversity at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) with 25 years of experience in biodiversity, conservation, and animal welfare. In his role at NRDC, Paul works to help reduce the impacts of international trade on imperiled species, including elephants, rhinos, giraffes, pangolins, and others. He also represents the organization in multilateral forums such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and the Convention on Migratory Species. Before coming to NRDC, Todd spent seven years as director of international law and policy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare and four years as a lobbyist for Defenders of Wildlife. He also worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide and communications director for two members of Congress. Paul has degrees in journalism, environmental science, and law from the University of Kansas.

Dan Esty

Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments in the Schools of Law and the Environment, and secondary appointments in the Schools of Management and Global Affairs. He has authored or edited 14 books, including Green to Gold and A Better Planet, and numerous articles on climate change, sustainability, corporate strategy, and trade. Professor Esty served in several leadership roles in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1989-93) and was on the U.S. delegation that negotiated the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. From 2011 to 2014, he was Commissioner of Connecticut\’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. He recently spent two years on public service leave from Yale at the World Trade Organization —helping WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to develop a sustainability agenda for the trade system. He co-leads the Remaking Trade for a Sustainable Future Project.

Susan J. Kraham

Susan J. Kraham is the Managing Attorney of Earthjustice\’s Northeast Regional Office. Based in New York, Susan oversees the team\’s work to achieve a healthy environment for all. The Northeast Regional Office partners with communities across the region in seeking equitable allocation and protection of environmental resources; transitioning to a zero emissions economy and addressing threats to clean air, clean water. Susan joined Earthjustice after more than a decade at Columbia Law School\’s Environmental Law Clinic. She has spent her legal career representing public interest clients with a particular focus on environmental and land use law. Susan previously served as Counsel to the New Jersey Audubon Society and from 1998 until 2005, she was a Clinical Professor in the Environmental Law Clinic at Rutgers Law School, Newark. Susan is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia University School of Law. She also holds a Masters in Urban Planning from New York University\’s Wagner School. After graduation from Law School, Susan clerked for the Honorable Justice Gary Stein of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Early in her career, she was awarded both a Skadden and Echoing Green fellowship.

Marianne Engelman Lado

Marianne Engelman Lado\’s career has been devoted to civil rights and environmental justice. During the Biden Administration she served in both the Office of General Counsel and the newly launched Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she focused on equity, environmental justice, and civil rights enforcement, and carried out the agency\’s mission to protect public health and the environment. She previously directed an Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School, which trained students in community lawyering and civil rights enforcement in the environmental justice context, and served as Lecturer at both the Yale University School of Public Health and the Yale School of the Environment, where she supervised interdisciplinary teams of law, environmental and public health students working on climate justice issues. She has served as senior staff attorney at Earthjustice, where she focused on civil rights enforcement, as well as related issues in the areas of toxics, waste, and agriculture, and the effects of contamination on environmentally overburdened populations. Her experience includes ten years as General Counsel at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), a non-profit civil rights law firm, where she directed a legal and advocacy program addressing racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, environmental justice, and disability rights, and she began her legal career as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where she represented clients attempting to break barriers of access to health care and quality education. Before joining EPA, she served as co-chair of the Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group of Connecticut\’s Governor\’s Council on Climate Change, and as a board member of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Center for Public Representation, a leading disability rights organization. Marianne has lectured widely and taught graduate, law and undergraduate level courses. She holds a B.A. in government from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications include “No More Excuses: Building a New Vision of Civil Rights Enforcement in the Context of Environmental Justice,” “Unfinished Agenda: The Need for Civil Rights Litigation to Address Continuing Patterns of Race Discrimination and Inequalities in Access to Health Care,” “Breaking the Barriers of Access to Health Care: A Discussion of the Role of Civil Rights Litigation and the Relationship Between Burdens of Proof and the Experience of Denial,” “Evaluating Systems for Delivering Legal Services to the Poor: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations” (co-authored with Gregg G. Van Ryzin), and “A Question of Justice: African-American Legal Perspectives on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases.” Her most recent writing focuses on civil rights enforcement in the environmental justice context.

William Tong

William Tong is the 25th Attorney General to serve Connecticut since the office was established by the state constitution in 1897. He first took office in 2019 and is currently serving his second term. Attorney General Tong is a national leader in many of the most consequential lawsuits and investigations in our country today, including bipartisan, multistate efforts to hold the addiction industry accountable for their role in the opioid crisis; to restore fair competition and prices in the generic drug industry; to hold social media giants accountable for the harms they may cause to kids and young people; to stop robocall scammers; and to ensure corporations safeguard our personal information from misuse and respect consumers\’ rights regarding the collection and use of their information. Attorney General Tong previously practiced for 18 years as a litigator in both state and federal courts. He served for 12 years as a State Representative in the Connecticut General Assembly, where he served as House Chairman of the Judiciary Committee as well as the Banking Committee. During his service in the legislature, Attorney General Tong was the author and driver of several major Connecticut laws, helping lead the state\’s efforts against gun violence and domestic violence, among many other critical laws and initiatives. A Connecticut native, Attorney General Tong grew up in the Hartford area and attended schools in West Hartford. He graduated from Phillips Academy Andover, Brown University, and the University of Chicago Law School. Attorney General Tong is the oldest of five children and grew up working side-by-side with his immigrant parents in their family\’s Chinese restaurant. He and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Stamford with their three children and way too many pets. Elizabeth is the Vice President of Tax for North America for Diageo Corporation. In quieter moments, General Tong likes to fly fish (and tie flies), try all the great foods and restaurants across Connecticut and is an amateur carpenter and cook. He is the first Asian American elected to statewide office in Connecticut history, and the first Chinese American to be elected Attorney General nationwide.

Howard Crystal

Howard Crystal is the Energy Justice Program Legal Director and Senior Attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Howard oversees the Energy Justice program\’s litigation promoting a clean energy transition, including fighting against both utility obstacles to distributed energy and centralized control of energy resources. He has spent his career in private and public-interest practice litigating environmental and wildlife protection, public health, safe energy and open government cases. He received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1993 and a bachelor\’s degree from Northwestern University.

Joshua Macey

Joshua Macey is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Macey teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions. Macey\’s latest work focuses on the fragility of the nation\’s electric grid and offers strategies to improve grid reliability and accelerate the transition to new sources of energy. In 2023, the American Bankruptcy Institute named Macey to its list of 40 Under 40 Emerging Leaders in Insolvency Practice. Macey has also won the Morrison Prize — awarded to the “most impactful sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North America during the previous year” — for three consecutive years (given, respectively, for “Zombie Energy Laws,” 73 Vanderbilt Law Review; “Long Live the Federal Power Act\’s Bright Line,” 134 Harvard Law Review; and “Clean Energy Through Grid Reliability,” 74 Stanford Law Review). Prior to his appointment at Yale Law School, Macey served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He served on the University of Chicago Law School\’s Journal and Faculty Appointments Committees, as well as the University of Chicago Business Law Review\’s Faculty Advisory Board. From 2019 to 2020, Macey was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley and clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Macey also co-authored the sixth edition of the leading energy law casebook, Energy, Economics, and the Environment. Macey holds a B.A. from Yale College and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Alexandra B. Klass

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at Michigan Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, environmental law, natural resources law, tort law, and property law. From April 2022 to July 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as deputy general counsel for energy efficiency and clean energy demonstrations at the US Department of Energy. Klass\’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation\’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation\’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. She is a co-author of Energy Law: Concepts and Insights Series, second edition (Foundation Press, 2020), Energy Law and Policy, third edition (West Academic Publishing, 2022), and Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases, fifth edition (Wolters Kluwer, 2022). Before her appointment at the University of Michigan, Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. During her time on the Minnesota Law faculty, she was named the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year in 2010 and 2020, and she served as associate dean for academic affairs from 2010 to 2012. She was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2015 and at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2019. Before her teaching career, Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. Klass has served in leadership positions in state and national bar organizations and nonprofits. She was a longtime member of the board of directors of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and chaired the group\’s legal committee. In 2020, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appointed her to the Governor\’s Advisory Council on Climate Change, where she served until 2022. In 2017, she received the Eldon G. Kaul Distinguished Service Award, presented by the Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law Section of the Minnesota State Bar Association to “a member of the bench or bar who has demonstrated a significant commitment and made an outstanding contribution to environmental, natural resources, or energy law in the state of Minnesota.

Zachary Liscow

Zachary Liscow is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In 2022–23, he was the Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. His wide-ranging work in law and economics currently covers tax policy, benefit-cost analysis, and infrastructure construction costs. He is particularly interested in developing cost-effective policies to address inequality and understanding what drives the high costs of building U.S. infrastructure. He has also worked in a variety of other areas, including environmental policy and empirical legal studies. Liscow\'s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNN, and elsewhere. Liscow earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with degrees in Economics and in Environmental Science and Public Policy. He grew up in South Haven, Michigan. In 2009–2010, he was a Staff Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He also worked for the World Bank\'s inspector general. Liscow clerked for the Honorable Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Gabrielle Carmine

Gabrielle Carmine is currently a PhD candidate at Duke University in the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab directed by Dr. Patrick N. Halpin. Her doctoral research, \"\‘Right to fish\’ for whom?: A geospatial study of high seas fisheries and its governance for ocean conservation\" focuses on high seas fisheries, corporate powers, and international ocean governance, including the United Nations high seas biodiversity treaty. Her work aims to examine high seas fisheries using Global Fishing Watch data to calculate fishing effort for corporate actors. She then applies these findings to Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) activities and conservation measures. The goal of this work is to ensure the protection of high seas animals and habitats from corporations benefitting from over-extraction, identify data-informed policy solutions to industrial overfishing on the high seas, while providing a unique lens to view accountability for the use and protection of marine biodiversity.

Kristina Gjerde

Kristina M. Gjerde, J.D., is Senior High Seas Advisor to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Ocean Team, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, and an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh. For more than 30 years, Kristina has worked on the progressive development of public international law relating to the marine environment. Since 2003, Kristina\’s primary focus has been promoting a United Nations Agreement to protect, conserve and sustain ocean life beyond national boundaries. The United Nations Agreement on Marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) was formally adopted on June 19, 2023.To advance understanding of and support for improved governance of BBNJ, Kristina has authored or co-authored more than 200 publications and co-founded four initiatives: Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative, Sargasso Sea Project, High Seas Alliance, and Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI). She sits on the advisory board of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and was previously part of the Executive Planning Group for the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. A graduate of New York University School of Law, in 2003 Kristina was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation to support her work on high seas governance reform. In 2023, Kristina received the IUCN World Commission on Protected Area\’s Fred Packard Award and in 2024 Kristina was honoured with the Elisabeth Haub Award for Environmental Law and Diplomacy for her instrumental role in the 2023 UN Agreement on Biodiversity beyond national Agreement.

Tamara Thomas

Tamara Thomas, Executive Director of Ocean Ties and ocean advisor to the IUCN, brings several years of expertise on Ocean Issues – across several international conventions and relevant fora including the Convention on Biological Diversity; UN Framework on Climate Change; BBNJ; as well as on matters related to seabed mining. Among her previous roles, she served as Director of International Ocean Policy for Conservation International, International Ocean Policy Advisor of the Global Oceans Program at The Nature Conservancy and Advisor to the Chair of the United Nations Preparatory Committee of BBNJ. Ms Thomas aides in the creation of country and international level policy to support integration of marine nature-based solutions and innovative finance approaches and positions them as integral to global development agendas. She holds a masters of environmental management from Yale University and currently serves as Ocean and Ocean-Climate Advisor to The Republic of Seychelles and co-leads, within BBNJ, Area Based Management Tools including Marine Protected Areas and Environmental Impact Assessments within the African Group.

Steve Roady

Professor of the Practice / Senior Lecturing Fellow

Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment / Duke Law School

Steve Roady is a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School and a professor of the practice of marine science and conservation at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Prior to joining the Duke faculty in 2016, he devoted several decades to litigation and administrative advocacy invoking the environmental and public health protections contained in federal statutes first enacted between 1970 and 1990. Between 1998 and 2001, Roady started and led the Ocean Law Project, which established many precedents requiring the government to better protect the ocean ecosystem. During 2001 and 2002, Roady served as the first president of Oceana, an international, nonprofit, non-government organization dedicated to protecting life in the sea. Roady has litigated and provided counseling in federal court and agency proceedings on matters arising under many federal statutes, including the Endangered Species Act, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. His federal court cases expanded the duty of federal agencies to consider environmental impacts, and buttressed public access to information. They imposed duties on the federal government to manage fishing in a sustainable manner. They protected endangered species and saved mountain streams.

Roady has assisted a number of Pacific Small Island Developing States with efforts to protect against sea level rise and ocean acidification. He represented various environmental organizations in negotiations with the Council on Environmental Quality as it formulated a new national ocean policy in 2009. At present he is providing outside advice to the International Seabed Authority as the ISA formulates regulations that are required to preserve the marine environment in connection with deep seabed mining. Roady has been teaching a course on ocean and coastal law and policy at Duke Law School and at the Duke School of the Environment since 2003. He received a Professor of the Year Award from the School of the Environment in 2008. During 2007-2008, he was recognized as a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow by Harvard Law School. His recent writings focus on deep seabed mining questions, and on ocean stewardship duties under the Public Trust Doctrine.

Lydia Slobodian

Lydia Slobodian is the Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at Georgetown Law School. She specializes in international environmental law, with a focus on climate change and biodiversity. Prior to Georgetown, Professor Slobodian worked as Senior Legal Officer for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), where she led the IUCN delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, and engaged with international processes under the Convention on Biological Diversity, Framework Convention on Climate Change, World Heritage Convention, Convention on Migratory Species and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. She is also a founding partner of L4Earth, an international nonprofit organization which strives to identify and promote legal levers for transformational planetary change.

Julie King

Julie King is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Law and Undergraduate Program Director at Baylor University, teaching courses in Environmental Law and Environmental Policy for Baylor\'s Environmental Science Department, including research courses in Advanced Environmental Law. Before entering higher education, Julie worked for 18 years in environmental litigation and regulatory compliance, representing corporate and individual clients and monitoring federal regulatory activity in environmental areas. Julie has a degree in law from Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville and a Bachelor\'s degree in Political Science from Vanderbilt University.

Paul Greenberg

Paul Greenberg is a fisherman and author whose writing on oceans, climate change, health, technology, and the environment appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and many other publications. Paul is the author of the bestsellers Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood, and has lectured widely on ocean issues at institutions ranging from TED to Google to the U.S. Senate. He is the recipient of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and many other grants and awards. Paul\’s PBS Frontline documentary The Fish on My Plate was among the most viewed Frontline films of the 2017 season and his TED Talk The four fish we\’re overeating – and what to eat instead has reached over 1.5 million viewers to date. Paul currently teaches within New York University\’s Animals Studies program.

Randall S. Abate

Randall S. Abate is the Assistant Dean for Environmental Law Studies and a Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University Law School. Prior to joining GW Law in July 2022, he held full-time law teaching and law school leadership positions for three decades at six U.S. law schools. With a primary focus on climate change law and justice, Dean Abate has lectured and taught courses in more than 25 countries on six continents and has published six books and more than 40 law journal articles and book chapters. He is the author of Climate Change and the Voiceless: Protecting Future Generations, Wildlife, and Natural Resources (Cambridge University Press, 2019); editor of Climate Justice: Case Studies in Global and Regional Governance Challenges (ELI Press, 2016) and Climate Change Impacts on Ocean and Coastal Law: U.S. and International Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2015); and co-editor of Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: The Search for Legal Remedies (Edward Elgar, 2013). He co-authored two law journal articles on climate migration governance in 2024 and has lectured around the country and the world on climate migration issues for the past decade. Early in his career, Dean Abate handled environmental law matters at two law firms in Manhattan. He holds a B.A. from the University of Rochester and a J.D. and M.S.L. (Environmental Law and Policy) from Vermont Law School.

Camila Bustos

Camila Bustos joined the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in 2023. She was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College, Clinical Supervisor in human rights rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights, and clerked for Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court. A graduate of Yale Law School, where she was recognized with the Francis Wayland Prize, Professor Bustos co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability and held leadership roles in several advocacy groups. Her work focuses on human rights law, environmental law, international environmental law, and climate change law. Her scholarship has been published in The Guardian, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the ABA human rights magazine, and more. She serves on the Advisory Board of Law Students for Climate Accountability and is a Board Member of Breach Collective.

Monica Iyer

Monica Iyer is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Georgia State University School of Law. As a scholar she focuses on the intersection of climate change and the environment and human rights, with a particular interest in the rights of migrants, racial justice, and gender justice. She was previously a Clinical Fellow/Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School\’s International Human Rights Clinic, and prior to joining academia, worked for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, including leading the Office\’s work on climate change-related migration. She has also worked as a human rights and civil rights attorney for several other organizations, including as an Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Office of the Attorney General. She holds degrees from NYU Law, the University of Chicago, and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy.

Gerald Torres

Gerald Torres is a professor at the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Law School. He is the former Association of American Law Schools President and has taught at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Torres served on the Board of the Environmental Law Institute and the EPA\’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and was the founding chairman of the Advancement Project. He is board chair of Earth Day and a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters. Torres is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has done groundbreaking work in agricultural law and policy, especially on the environmental regulation of food and fiber production. He has written in the area of water resource management. While continuing to focus on the role of social movements in producing durable legal change, Torres is finishing a book on environmental justice. An internationally known scholar of Indian law, Torres has recently focused on cooperative resource management between tribes, the states, and the federal government, and the changing legal landscape within American colonies.

Nicholas Robinson

Prof. Nicholas A. Robinson is among the pioneers who first established the field of environmental law. He served on the Legal Advisory Committee to the Council On Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 1970, advising on implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, and participated in the UN 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which established the UN Environment Programme. He stepped down in 2024 from leading the International Council of Environmental Law (founded in 1969 in New Delhi). Elected twice to chair the World Commission on Environmental Law of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), he participated in IUCN\’s drafting of the UN World Charter for Nature and the Convention on Biological Diversity. He edited the traveaux préparatoires for the 1992 Rio UN Earth Summit. He served under five presidents as a US delegate to the USA-USSR bilateral environment law cooperation negotiations (1974-92). He drafted New York\’s wetlands statutes and wild birds act and was a leader in the campaign to successfully amend the NY Constitution to provide the right to the environment. Prof. Robinson founded the environmental law programs at Pace University\’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in 1978, and also taught international and comparative environmental law at Yale School of Environment for two decades as Professor Adjunct. He edited UNEP\’s Manual on International Environmental Law (2006) and founded the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law in 2003. Over his career, he has lectured at universities in more than 50 nations. At the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2022, he led the campaign for States to renounce, for the first time, the colonial “Doctrine of Discovery” that leads to destruction of indigenous Peoples. He is currently studying the treaties of the Lenape Nation with the colonial and US federal governments. He is University Professor for the Environment at Pace University. He holds a BA from Brown University (1967) and a JD from Columbia University (1970).

Cliff Villa

On leave from the tenured faculty of the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Law, Prof. Cliff Villa served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Deputy Assistant Administrator for the U.S. EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, he supported Biden-Harris priorities for environmental justice and climate action through political leadership of national programs including Superfund cleanup, Brownfields revitalization, hazardous waste management, and emergency preparedness and response. In addition to UNM, Villa has also taught at Columbia Law School and Seattle University. Before entering academia, Villa spent more than 20 years as an EPA attorney in Washington, D.C.; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington. Among other publications, Villa is the lead author of Environmental Justice: Law, Policy & Regulation (3rd ed. 2020), and author of legal scholarship including Law and Lawyers in the Incident Command System (2013), Remaking Environmental Justice (2020); Don\’t Blame the Flint River (2022), and Environmental Justice Beyond 2 ̊ (2024). Villa was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with local roots tracing back to the Atrisco Land Grant of 1692.

Ken Lucero

Dr. Ken Lucero, a proud member of the Pueblo of Zia and hailing from the Pueblo of Cochiti, is dedicated to improving the health and welfare of his people and all tribal communities. He has done so by serving as the Tribal Administrator for Zia Pueblo, being an active member of the Zia Tribal Council, and as Director for RWJF Center for Native American Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Lucero is currently the Tribal and Indigenous Lands Initiative Director at Trust for Public Land, where he supports Tribal and Indigenous communities and their efforts to reconnect to their ancestral lands, honor Tribal sovereignty, and maintain native culture, language, and traditions. As part of that mission, the Tribal and Indigenous Lands program seeks to address the delicate balance between advancing LandBack initiatives to support Tribal sovereignty and influencing the expectations of major giving institutions and conservation community members.

Ali Zaidi

Former White House National Climate Advisor

Ali Zaidi served as Assistant to the President of the United States and National Climate Advisor. In this role, he led the White House Climate Policy Office, which coordinated policy development and the U.S. government’s overall strategy on climate and clean energy. During his White House service (2021-2025), Zaidi advanced a broad effort to re-establish U.S. climate and clean energy leadership by designing and implementing a broad set of executive actions and key legislation, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.

Before joining the Biden-Harris Administration, Zaidi served as the state of New York’s Deputy Secretary for Energy and Environment and Chairman of Climate Policy and Finance, where he led the state's efforts on climate change. Zaidi also taught graduate courses on technology policy as an adjunct professor at Stanford University and co-founded Lawyers for a Sustainable Economy, a Stanford-coordinated initiative that equips sustainability-focused startups with pro bono legal services.

Over the course of his career, Zaidi has advised non-profits, including as a Trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and counseled the private sector, as an attorney who helped launch a sustainable investment practice focused on fund formation, M&A, and governance in the climate and clean energy arena. Zaidi received an A.B. from Harvard University and J.D. from Georgetown University.