Board of Directors

We're looking for board members!

Do you have skills in fundraising? Legal? Marketing? Environmental science? Do you want to join a group of dedicated organizers, activists, and earth lovers to help protect land? Please drop us a line if you're interested. We could use the help!

Board of Directors

Max Wilbert - Board President
Max Wilbert is a writer and biocentric community organizer. He has been part of grassroots political work for 20 years, and is the founder of Protect Thacker Pass. Max is the author of two books, most recently "Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It" (Monkfish 2021). His work has been featured on CNN, The New York Times, NPR, Le Monde, BBC, and elsewhere.

Saba Malik - Secretary
Saba Malik was born in Reading, England to Pakistani immigrant parents. She has been a feminist since she was old enough to shout "No!" and a radical feminist since the age of 18. She's also been a part of anti-racist and radical environmental movements. She is a counselor and life coach at a grass roots bay area community non profit that helps at-risk youth reach their full potential. She is the mother of two children who have miraculously become young adults.

Rahman Malik - Treasurer

Rahman is a visionary entrepreneur who chose to diverge from the traditional path by forgoing college to pursue his dreams as a business owner. Fertile Ground Conservancy represents his passion for protecting wild nature, where he finds solace and thrives amidst the serenity of the wilderness.

Advisory board

Suprabha Seshan has lived and worked for twenty-two years at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in the Western Ghat mountains of India. The Sanctuary is a center for plant conservation, habitat restoration and environmental education, and also a community. In 2006, on behalf of the Sanctuary she won the Whitley Award, UK’s top prize for nature conservation. She is an Ashoka Fellow. Her current focus is the restoration of one of India’s most endangered ecosystems: the high elevation shola grasslands.

John McLaughlin is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Sciences Department at Huxley College of the Environment. His teaching and research interests center on population ecology, wildlife ecology, and conservation biology. He holds a Doctorate in Biology from Stanford University and has been integrally involved in the effort to remove two dams on the Elwha River in Washington state, and in the restoration work that is continuing there. A partial list of his published journal articles can be found here.

Dominique Christina is a writer, performer, educator, and activist. She holds four national titles in the three years she has been competing in slam, including the 2012 and 2014 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. She is presently the only person to have held two national titles at one time and the only poet in history to win the Women of the World Poetry Championship TWICE. Her work is greatly influenced by her family's legacy in the Civil Rights Movement; her grandfather was a Hall of Famer in the Negro Leagues, while her aunt, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, was one of the Little Rock Nine. Dominique has always known she was a colored girl. Her writing is a celebration of that. Dominique Christina has performed across the country, opening for Cornel West, and performing for the Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till families in Washington DC at the Shiloh Baptist Church. A former 1996 Olympic Volleyball player, Dominique has over 10 years' experience as a licensed teacher, holding double master's degrees in education and English Literature. Her website is located here.

Thomas Linzey serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to globally advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” and “rights of nature” movements which have resulted in the adoption of several hundred laws across the United States and around the world. He sits on the Board of Advisors of the New Earth Foundation. Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, and he is admitted to practice in the United States Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. He also serves as a faculty member for the National Academy of Continuing Legal Education (NACLE) and for Lawline, both national providers of continuing legal education courses for lawyers. He is a co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School – now taught in twenty-four states across the country which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials – which assists groups to create new community campaigns which elevate the rights of those communities over rights claimed by corporations. Linzey is the author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability (PM Press 2016), the co-author of We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States (PM Press 2016), and the author of Modern American Democracy and Other Fairy Tales (forthcoming, Spring, 2023), has served as a co-host of Democracy Matters, a public affairs radio show broadcast from KYRS in Spokane, Washington and syndicated on ten other stations, was featured in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tree Media’s film 11th Hour and We the People 2.0 (Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival), assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable rights of ecosystems, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, the Nation magazine, he was named, in 2007, as one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and, in 2018, Linzey was named as one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in the two volume encyclopedia, American Environmental Leaders (3rd Ed. Grey House Publishing 2018). Linzey currently resides in Spokane, Washington. The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights can be found at www.centerforenvironmentalrights.org.