The Thoreau Institute Board of Directors and Staff

An important principle of the Thoreau Institute is that there are no enemies of the environment, only people with different incentives. Part of the Institute's mission is to bring together people from different interest groups in an effort to resolve conflicts.

This is apparent in the Institute's board, which includes representatives from a number of seemingly disparate interests. The board includes:

• John Baden is president and founder of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE). John is a free-market environmentalist who supports user fees, trust funds, conservation easements, and other incentive-based tools for solving environmental problems. In the past, John has proposed to sell the federal lands, but he now supports the idea of managing them as land trusts.
• Doug Crandall is chief of staff of the Forests and Forest Health Subcommittee of the House Resources Committee. Before moving to Washington, Doug managed a sawmill in Livingston, Montana, where he gained a reputation as an eloquent and charismatic advocate of timber cutting in the national forests. He is also an ardent fly fisherman.
• William Ferrell is a retired professor of forest ecology at Oregon State University who runs a nursery in Philomath, Oregon. Bill has worked as a consultant for, among others, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Thoreau Institute board members Crandall and Stahl, as well as economist O'Toole, all learned forest ecology from Bill before they graduated from the OSU College of Forestry during the 1970s.
• James Huffman is dean of the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College. Having obtained his law degree from the University of Chicago, Jim calls himself a "Chicago-school attorney"--a reference to his outspoken support of free-market environmentalism.
• Wendy Pratt is senior associate with the NewPoint Group, a management consulting firm that works with public agencies. She has co-authored a book on Hazardous Waste and written numerous reports on pollution, recycling, and other environmental problems.
• Andy Stahl is the director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Andy has worked as a forester for environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, for over a decade and was one of the leading figures in efforts to save Pacific Northwest old-growth forests.

• O'Toole has worked as a consultant for environmental groups ever since graduating from the OSU School of Forestry in 1974. In that time he has visited well over half of the national forests in the country and is the author of Reforming the Forest Service and The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.
• Hess has a Ph.D. in range ecology from New Mexico State University. He is the author of two recent books: Visions Upon the Land, published by Island Press, and Rocky Times in Rocky Mountain National Park, published by the University of Colorado Press.

In addition, Thoreau Institute associate Brian Child manages the South Luongwe National Park in Zambia. Child has a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford and is world famous for his work in community-based conservation.

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