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66th Annual
Northeast Fish and Wildlife Conference
Sunday, April 25 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Marriott Boston Newton, Newton, Massachusetts |
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| PLENARY SESSION |
The plenary session for the 66th Northeast Fish & Wildlife Conference will commence with a welcome from Commissioner Mary Griffin of the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game. Commissioner Mary Griffin has been an environmental professional for the past 20 years. She previously served as Acting Deputy Commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Prior to this role, she served as Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau of Resource Protection at MassDEP, which protects inland and coastal water resources, including wetlands.
Commissioner Griffin has served as General Counsel to the Secretary of Environmental Affairs, and Boston Harbor Regional Coordinator at the Office of Coastal Zone Management. As Chief of Legal Services for the state parks system, she managed the agency's land acquisition program. The Commissioner also served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Protection Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office.
Ian A. Bowles, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will deliver the keynote address. Secretary Bowles oversees the Commonwealth’s six environmental, natural resource and energy regulatory agencies: the Departments of Environmental Protection, Public Utilities, Energy Resources, Conservation & Recreation, Agriculture, and Fish & Game. He also serves as Chairman of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, the Energy Facilities Siting Board, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a new agency charged with promoting R&D, workforce training and economic incentives for the Commonwealth’s rapidly growing clean energy industry.
Under Governor Deval Patrick, Massachusetts is the first state in the nation to combine energy and environmental agencies under one Cabinet secretary with the shared mission of bringing clean energy technology to market, curbing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting energy costs. In the 2007-08 session, Secretary Bowles worked with legislative leaders to enact six major energy and environmental laws, encompassing broad energy reform, economy-wide greenhouse gas reduction, comprehensive oceans management, and biofuels. He also oversees Governor Patrick’s land conservation initiative, the largest in the Commonwealth’s history.
Bowles has more than 20 years of experience in energy and the environment. He was a Director or Advisor to three early stage clean energy technology companies. In the Clinton Administration, Bowles served as Associate Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and as Senior Director of the Global Environmental Affairs directorate at the National Security Council, where he coordinated American foreign policy on global climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, international trade and environment standards, and related aspects of energy and security policy.
Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Bowles held appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and as Senior Advisor at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a multibillion dollar charitable foundation established by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Bowles also served as President & CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based research institute, and as Publisher of CommonWealth magazine.
Earlier in his career, Bowles was Vice President of Conservation International, a leading international conservation organization. Bowles played a key role in the creation of one of the world’s largest tropical forest national parks: the 4 million acre Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Bowles began his career as a Legislative Assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Following the Secretary’s keynote address, four prominent speakers, all national and international leaders on global climate change, will round out the plenary session.
They include:
- DAN ASHE, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR POLICY, U.S. FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE
Dan Ashe is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Deputy Director for Policy. In this capacity, he oversees assistant directors in the Washington, D.C. office, providing strategic program direction and developing policy and guidance to support and promote program development and fulfill the Service mission.
Prior to his appointment as Deputy Director, Ashe served as the Science Advisor to the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Appointed to this position in March, 2003, he advised the Service Director and provided leadership on science policy and scientific applications to resource management. As Science Advisor, Ashe led an organizational renaissance for science and professionalism, leading the Service’s efforts to respond to changes in the global climate system; shaping an agency agenda for change toward a science-driven, landscape conservation business model; defining an agency Code of Scientific and Professional Conduct; authoring new guidelines for scientific peer review and information quality; building state-of-the-art, electronic literature access for employees; and reinstituting internal scientific publication outlets. He was also responsible for leading efforts to build stronger relationships with the U.S. Geological Survey, and scientific professional societies.
- HECTOR GALBRAITH, DIRECTOR, CLIMATE CHANGE INITIATIVE, MANOMET CENTER FOR CONSERVATION SCIENCES
Hector Galbraith is the director for the Climate Change Initiative at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. He is one of the leading scientists in the field of evaluating the current and future impacts of climate change on ecological resources and of developing science-based adaptation strategies. The results of his research have been published in over 60 papers and chapters in books and peer-reviewed journals. He has carried out research projects for U.S. federal and state agencies into the likely impacts of global climate change on ecosystems, including evaluating the potential impacts of sea level rise on coastal ecosystems; how climate change might affect services provided by ecosystems in California and Arizona; developing an analytical framework for assessing species’ vulnerabilities to climate change; and predicting the potential impacts of climate change on alpine tundra habitats and animals in the U.S. He has written a major report for the PEW Charitable Trust on the observed effects of climate change in Rocky Mountain National Park, edited and contributed to a major report from the American Bird Conservancy on ecosystem vulnerability in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in southern Arizona.
- KEVIN KNOBLOCH, PRESIDENT, UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS
Kevin Knobloch is President of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). He brings 30 years of experience in legislative policy, media, and advocacy to his job as leader of the UCS. He is knowledgeable about a wide range of environmental and arms control issues, including natural resource and clean energy economics, advanced technology vehicles, nuclear weapons, forest conservation, renewable energy, and corporate responsibility.
Mr. Knobloch first worked at UCS from 1989 to 1992 as legislative director for Arms Control and National Security. He returned in January 2000 and was named president in December 2003. He oversees all of the organization's research, public education, and legislative programs.
Mr. Knobloch recently served as chair of the Green Group, a coalition of the CEOs of 34 national environmental organizations, and currently serves as co-chair, along with Frances Beinecke of NRDC, of the Green Group Climate and Energy Committee. He led UCS delegations to the United Nations International Climate negotiations in Montreal in 2005 and in Bali in 2007.
In addition to his positions at UCS, he served as director of conservation programs for the Appalachian Mountain Club in Boston. During six years on Capitol Hill, he was the legislative director for U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) and legislative assistant and press secretary for U.S. Representative Ted Weiss (D-NY). He began his career as an award-winning newspaper journalist, writing for several Massachusetts publications. He recently completed eight years on the board of directors of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) and serves on the Environmental League of Massachusetts board of directors. He is also cofounder and former president of the Arlington (MA) Land Trust.
- JOHN KOSTYACK, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND GLOBAL WARMING FOR THE THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION
John Kostyack is Executive Director of Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming for the National Wildlife Federation, where he leads the Federation's nationwide program focused on safeguarding wildlife and ecosystems threatened by climate change. A top priority of this program is enacting natural resources protection and funding provisions in federal global warming legislation. John frequently writes and lectures on meeting the challenges of conserving U.S. wildlife and ecosystems.
- With Professor Dan Rohlf, he recently published Conserving Endangered Species in an Era of Global Warming, a chapter in the American Bar Association's Endangered Species Act Deskbook (2009).
- He also is the author, with Professor Reid Ewing, of Endangered by Sprawl: How Runaway Development Threatens America's Wildlife (January 2005), the first national study to quantify the impact of sprawling land use patterns on the nation’s biological diversity.
He serves on the steering committee of the Wildlife Habitat Policy Research Program, a national grant-making program developing new tools to accelerate conservation of U.S. wildlife habitat.
John is a longtime leader in Endangered Species Act policy and litigation. He helped to win the endangered species conservation tax incentive for private landowners recently passed by Congress. He has testified before Congressional committees on a wide variety of ESA matters, has led coalition efforts to strengthen the ESA, and has won victories in cases to protect habitat for the ivory-billed woodpecker, Key deer, Florida panther, gray wolf, and Swainson's hawk.
He also represented a diverse coalition of wildlife conservationists in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Court's first-ever global warming case, Massachusetts v EPA. |
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