Staff and Board
Sarah Peters, Legal Liaison/Staff Attorney (Oregon)
Sarah has a JD from the University of Oregon School of Law and a BS in Environmental Science from Indiana University. Sarah graduated from UO Law with certificates in Environmental and Natural Resources Law, Public Interest Law, and Pro Bono Work and is a member of the State Bars of Colorado (inactive), Montana, and Oregon. Sarah is on the board of Cascadia Wildlands and Friends of Land Air Water, as well as a member of a Bureau of Land Management Eugene District Resource Advisory Council.
Tom Petersen, Development Director
Tom has an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana and has worked as a fundraiser for not-for-profit environmental groups for 20 years. He has been with Wildlands CPR for 16 years, and was co-founder and Executive Director of a successful community garden program in North Carolina for seven years, creating funding strategies, budgets, and development plans for the organization. Tom was also a Board member of the Wild Rockies Field Institute (WRFI) and sat on the Advisory Board of Orion Magazine's Grassroots Network. In addition to working in the non-profit world, Tom is a published nature writer, and editor of the 2006 anthology on wildland roads, A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places (Johnson Books, Boulder CO).
Adam Rissien, Policy Specialist
Adam Rissien has been with Wildlands CPR since April 2007, first as the Montana Off-Road Vehicle Coordinator and now as the organization's Policy Specialist working on issues such as regulations affecting motorized recreation, forest planning and watershed restoration, as well as efforts to reduce the Forest Service road system. Adam earned his MS in Environmental Studies at the University of Montana with an emphasis on national forest policy, which culminated in a professional paper examining restoration principles, their on-the-ground application and intersection with the Forest Service budgetary process. Prior to this, Adam spent eight years in Montana working and volunteering on numerous environmental issues, including tracking snowmobile trespass in roadless and Wilderness areas, documenting illegal ORV use in the Great Burn Proposed Wilderness Area, and serving as Chair of the Sierra Club's Bitterroot-Mission Group.
Adam Switalski, Science Program Director
Adam earned a Masters in Wildlife Ecology from Utah State University, working with John Bissonette, a renowned leader in road mitigation research. Adam’s graduate work quantified the behavioral response of coyotes to wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. For the last eight years, Adam has coordinated interdisciplinary research projects on road decommissioning and fish, wildlife, and vegetation and coauthored papers in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, and Restoration Ecology. He also has published reviews of the impacts of off-road vehicles and developed Best Management Practices for their management. He is a Faculty Affiliate of the University of Montana’s Environmental Studies Program and is President of the Montana Chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Bethanie Walder, Executive Director
Bethanie Walder, Executive Director since 1995, has an undergraduate degree in Political Science from Duke University and a Master's in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana. For her Master's degree, she completed an in-depth study of the "forest health crisis" for Hells Canyon Preservation Council (and other activists) to use to challenge forest health timber sales. Prior to working with Wildlands CPR, Bethanie spent a year working on roadless area protection for The Ecology Center in Missoula. She was a founding member of Women's Voices for the Earth, also in Missoula, serving on their steering committee from its inception until July 1997. She has been on the board of the American Lands Alliance since 1997, including several periods serving on the executive committee. Bethanie serves as a faculty affiliate for the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Montana. She also sits on the board of the North Missoula Community Development Corporation, which focuses on affordable housing and promoting livable, thriving neighborhoods within the Missoula community.
Cathrine Walters, Program Associate
Cathrine earned her BS in Natural Resource Management in Wisconsin and worked as a range technician and wildlife technician in Wisconsin and Idaho. She eventually landed in Missoula and joined Wildlands CPR's staff in August 2005 as their Program Associate. After a short hiatus during the summer of 2007 to pursue her other passion, photography, she returned that fall to split her time with Wildlands CPR and shooting.
Marlies Wierenga, WA/OR Coordinator
Marlies joined Wildlands CPR in October 2011 bringing with her over a decade of experience using her technical, policy and public involv
ement skills to address watershed and water quality challenges throughout the Pacific Northwest. She has analyzed environmental conditions and developed numerous shoreline, watershed and water quality plans for local and state jurisdictions. Marlies has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Arizona and a Master’s in Environmental Studies from the Evergreen State College where her thesis analyzed the dual mandate of National Parks in Alaska to meet conservation goals and support the subsistence practices of local people (focus was Wrangell-St. Elias National Park). Most recently, she assisted regional partners in Southwest Washington with implementation of salmon recovery and watershed management plans for the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board.
Board Members
The Board of Directors is a group of individuals dedicated to preserving and recovering wilderness by removing roads. They stay involved in the decision-making process through frequent e-mail and phone communication regarding major issues and allocation of funds. We have one annual weekend meeting per year, plus quarterly phone conferences. Wildlands CPR's Director is responsible for day-to-day decisions, and she frequently consults with individual members of the board on specific issues. Board members can serve up to 2 consecutive 3-year terms, but then must step down for at least a year before rejoining the board.
2011 Board & Staff Meeting, B-Bar Ranch, Emigrant, MT
Front row (from left):Jack Tuholske, Sarah Peters, Rebecca Lloyd, ranch dog
Back row: Cathrine Walters, Crystal Mario, Marion Hourdequin, Brett Paben, Dave Heller, Adam Rissien, TomPetersen, Adam Switalski, Bethanie Walder
Susan Jane Brown, Vice President, is a staff attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. Her primary focus of litigation is federal public lands forest management, but her practice includes cases involving the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act,National Forest Management Act, and other land management statutes. Susan Jane also spent three years as Executive Director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, where she created and led a comprehensive, cohesive, and mutually beneficial collaborative strategy among environmentalists, citizens, and public officials focusing on sustainable uses of public forest lands in southwest Washington State. She continues her involvement in collaborative working groups across the Pacific Northwest.
Dave Heller retired from the Forest Service in 2010. His most recent position was as the Regional Program Leader for the Forest Service Fish and Aquatic Resource Program in the Pacific Northwest, where he managed diverse programs on twenty National Forests in Oregon and Washington with budgets averaging about $10 million/year. During his work with the Forest Service he was also involved in several international projects, including watershed restoration projects (mostly related to salmon restoration) in British Columbia, Russia and Mexico. He was also involved in several Forest Service partnership and cost share programs for fish and aquatic resources, for example serving on the boards of Wolftree and the Native Fish Society. He currently serves on the Oregon Fish Passage Task Force, an advisory group to the Director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Dave will be joining Wildlands CPR’s board in May 2011.
Crystal Mario, Secretary/Treasurer, founded and runs Rivanna Natural Designs. After a distinguished career with such high-profile companies as AdobeSystems, Inc. and Xerox Imaging Systems, Crystal was tired of spending her life in airports and hotel rooms. She started Rivanna Natural Designs in 2001 with a simple objective: to provide safe, meaningful, and rewarding employment for recently-arrived refugees and others in our community who need a second start or an opportunity to learn new skills. Rivanna uses sustainably harvested or reclaimed wood and recycled glass to create the clocks, plaques, pens, and desk accessories for sale through the company’s online store.
Brett Paben, President is an attorney with WildLaw, where he has worked since graduating from the University of Oregon School of Law in 2000, with his J.D. and a certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law. Brett also holds bachelors' degrees in International Affairs and Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida. Brett works on public lands, endangered species and anti-pollution related issues, with a particular focus on National Forests.
Marion Hourdequin is an assistant professor of philosophy at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, CO. Marion holds an A.B. in biology from Princeton University, Master's degrees in ecology and philosophy from University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University. Marion's teaching and research interests include environmental ethics, comparative ethics, and philosophy of science. With her husband, David Havlick (a geography professor at University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, former Wildlands CPR Board Member, and author of No Place Distant: Roads and Motorized Recreation on America’s Public Lands), Marion was recently awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the ecological restoration on former military lands now designated as National Wildlife Refuges. In 1995 and 1996, Marion worked as co-director of Wildlands CPR, and she has been on Wildlands CPR’s advisory board since then, returning as a formal member of the Board of Directors in January 2010.
Jack Tuholske joined Wildlands CPR’s board in February 2011. Since graduating from the University of Montana School of Law with honors in 1985, Jack has been in private practice in Missoula, Montana, with an emphasis on public interest environmental litigation in state and federal court in Montana and the West. He has been lead counsel for over 45 published decisions, including over a dozen successful cases at the Montana Supreme Court. These cases span environmental, land use, water law, constitutional law and natural resource management. In recognition of his work on behalf of public interest groups, Jack was awarded the William O. Douglas Award by the Sierra Club in 2002 and the Kerry Rydberg Award in 2010 by the University of Oregon Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. More recently, Tuholske has combined teaching with his practice. He has taught a variety of courses and lectured frequently at The University of Montana and Vermont Law School. In the spring of 2009 Tuholske taught two courses at the Law Faculty University of Ljubljana in Slovenia as a Fulbright Scholar.
Kathi Nickel brings a complementary array of marketing, advertising and fundraising skills to Wildlands CPR. With a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts, and a Masters in Broadcast Production from San Francisco State University, she spent years working in advertising in San Francisco, merchandising and sales development for NBC in New York, and on air promotion for CBS in Los Angeles. Her work with non-profits began almost 30 years ago as a founding Board member of the California Living Museum in Bakersfield, CA. Retiring to MIssoula in 1998, she has been involved in promotion and fundraising for many cultural and environmental organizations including the Missoula Art Museum, Missoula Children's Theatre, Special Olympics Montana, and Trout Unlimited. She is still active in her family's agricultural operations in California that includes managing historical riparian water rights and commerical farming (both row and permanent crops.) Kathi joined our Board in January 2012.
Photos provided by Wildlands CPR staff
