Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice

Cameron La Follette has a law degree from Columbia University School of Law, a Masters in Psychology from New York University, and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from the University of Oregon. Her initial environmental activism (1978-1982) was with Oregon nonprofit organizations that focused on preserving ancient forests on Federal public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management to protect salmon habitat, clean drinking water, and forest ecosystems. She served on the Salem, OR, Planning Commission for three years (2002-05) applying the City of Salem’s land use and zoning ordinances to many situations ranging from residential housing to industrial and commercial properties. Since 2010, she has been Executive Director of an environmental and land use nonprofit that focuses on protecting the natural resources of the Oregon coast, working with residents to oppose ill-advised land use projects, and helping maintain livable coastal communities. She is the co-author, with Chris Maser, of Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction, published by CRC Press in 2017. She was the lead author on "Oregon’s Manila Galleon," a special issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly published in June 2018, and has also written several articles on Oregon coastal history for the online Oregon Encyclopedia.

Chris Maser spent over 25 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, coastal, and agricultural settings. Trained primarily as a vertebrate zoologist, he was a research mammalogist in Nubia, Egypt, (1963-1964) with the Yale University Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition and a research mammalogist in Nepal (1966-1967), where he participated in a study of tick-borne diseases for the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit #3 based in Cairo, Egypt. He conducted a three-year (1970-1973) ecological survey of the Oregon Coast for the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. He was a research ecologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for thirteen years--the first seven (1974-1981) studying the biophysical relationships in rangelands in southeastern Oregon and the last six (1982-1987) studying old-growth forests in western Oregon. He also spent a year as a landscape ecologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1990-1991).

He is an independent author as well as an international lecturer, facilitator in resolving environmental conflicts, vision statements, and sustainable community development. He is also an international consultant in forest ecology and sustainable forestry practices. He has written or edited over 290 publications, including 43 books.