BOARD OF TRUSTEES

IJNR's Board of Trustees establishes policies and provides strategic oversight and guidance for the organization. The board meets annually and holds informal conference calls quarterly. Members serve staggered, three-year terms to ensure continuity of leadership. IJNR's bylaws provide that half the members must have backgrounds in journalism, while the other half must have backgrounds in natural resources, natural sciences or the environment.

Paul Rogers, Board Chairman (San Jose, California)

Paul is the resources and environment reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, where he has worked since 1989. He is also the managing editor of "QUEST," a weekly radio and television program broadcast on KQED, the San Francisco affiliate of PBS and National Public Radio. The series examines science and environment issues throughout Northern California.

In 1990, Paul was part of the Mercury News team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. At the newspaper, he covers a broad range of issues that affect everything from forests, public grasslands and urban parks to fisheries and coastal development. He also teaches graduate science writing at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Karla Chambers, Vice Chairman (Corvallis, Oregon)

Karla is vice president and co-owner (with her husband Bill) of Stahlbush Island Farms, a 4,000-acre farming and food-processing business established in 1985 in Corvallis, Oregon. The company grows such food crops as broccoli, green beans, bell peppers, corn, squash, peas, wheat and strawberries. By combining best practices of organic and sustainable agriculture, Stahlbush has improved soils, conserved water and increased crop yields while also sharply curtailing riverbank erosion and the use of synthetic pesticides.

Stahlbush ships its flash-frozen and pureed foods to industrial, retail and food-service customers in 42 states and 16 countries. Karla is a fourth-generation Oregon farmer. She has an interdisciplinary master's degree from Oregon State University with concentrations in agricultural and resource economics, business administration and political science. She serves on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, thereby contributing to formulation of U.S. monetary policy.

Mary G. Hager, Treasurer (Falls Church, Virginia)

Mary is a versatile freelance writer who retired a few years ago from Newsweek magazine after a long, productive career as a Washington-based correspondent and contributing editor. Since 1978, she has reported extensively on issues of science, medicine and the environment. Her more recent work includes commission reports to the President and Congress on arthritis and epilepsy. Her writing received considerable recognition over the years, including the Balance in Journalism Award of the National Environmental Development Association, the Page One Award of the New York Newspaper Guild, and the Searle Award of the American Medical Writers Association.

In 1997, she was a member of the U.S. Delegation to the U.S./Japan Common Agenda Conference on Environmental Education. In 2000, she traveled to Southeast Asia as a Senator John Heinz Fellow in Environmental Reporting. She serves on the board of directors of the National Research Center for Women & Families.

Rick Rodriquez, Secretary (Phoenix, Arizona)

Rick Rodriquez is a Professor of Journalism, Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor, and Professor of Practice at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is is the Cronkite School's first Carnegie Professor specializing in Latino and transnational news coverage. The former executive editor of The Sacramento Bee in Sacramento, Calif., and the first Latino president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors came to the Cronkite School in 2008 to develop a new cross-disciplinary specialization in the coverage of issues related to Latinos and the U.S.-Mexico border. While he was at the Bee, the paper won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Rodriguez is known nationally as a champion of watchdog journalism and newsroom diversity.

Bebe Crouse, Trustee (Bozeman, Montana)

Bebe is an accomplished reporter, editor and documentary maker. In late 2006, she traded the humidity and politics of Washington, DC for a slower paced life in Bozeman, Montana. Prior to that move, Bebe spent nearly 10 years as the Western and Environment Editor at National Public Radio. She worked as a reporter in Oregon and California, as well as Mexico and Central America—where she covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and Guatemala, timber wars in Oregon and water wars throughout the West. Bebe also spent five years at CBS News in New York, where she wrote radio commentary for Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt, and produced television segments for the network. She was part of a team that produced the first live U.S. television broadcasts from Cuba, during the Castro-Gorbachev summit. Her work has been recognized with Dupont, Casey, Robert F. Kennedy, Headliner and Society of Professional Journalism Awards as well as an Emmy nomination.

She is now working as a consultant for non-profit science and conservation organizations to help them improve their communications. She believes that too often, the scientists, economists and other specialists, who have the sort of unbiased data that is essential to good conservation and land use decisions, lack the skills to cut through the overwhelming din of conflict surrounding these issues. Her goal is to help them lose the jargon and become effective and compelling story-tellers—a goal not unlike that of a good journalist!

Diane Hawkins-Cox, Trustee (Atlanta, Georgia)

Diane served until recently as a senior producer for the science and technology unit at CNN in Atlanta. She joined CNN just months before the cable network was launched in 1980. She has been a co-producer of Next@CNN, a weekly hour-long newsmagazine focusing on technology, science, environment, and space, and the producer of Earth Matters, a weekly half-hour news magazine on global environmental issues. Along with colleagues in the CNN Environment Unit, Diane won a national Emmy for "In Nature's Wake," a CNN special program about the 1993 Mississippi River floods, and the Cable ACE Award for coverage of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

Before joining CNN, Diane was a writer and producer with KCMO-TV (now KCTV-TV) in Kansas City. In 2006, she served as a juror for the first Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment. In addition to being a member of IJNR's Board of Trustees, she serves on IJNR's Council of Advisors.

Amy Marasco Newton, Trustee (McLean, Virginia)

Amy Marasco Newton serves as chair of the executive board of the Newton Marasco Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works collaboratively on issues of environmental stewardship. She is also an executive-management consultant with nearly three decades of experience in serving such diverse clients as government agencies, public and private sector companies and nonprofit groups. Her areas of expertise include environmental programs, education and outreach and affordable housing.

As a co-founder of an environmental consulting firm with more than 350 employees, she coordinated more than a million hours of consulting services to programs of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She also led numerous management studies, facilitated strategic-planning retreats and coached clients on ways to improve their organizational and management practices.

Patrick A. Shea, Trustee (Salt Lake City, Utah)

Pat Shea is a prominent Utah lawyer, educator and businessman. He practices real-estate law with emphasis on mining and environmental issues and the conservation and development of publicly owned lands. In the late 1990s, he served as Director of the Bureau of Land Management and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals. In that capacity, he oversaw the BLM, Minerals Management Services and Office of Surface Mining. During his tenure, these three federal agencies had a combined budget of more than $2.5 billion and responsibility for management of more 270 million acres of land and for all off-shore drilling and natural-gas production in the United States.

He has been an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Utah and has taught law school courses Brigham Young University. He also has served as president of City Creek Canyon Park, a natural history park in downtown Salt Lake City.

Reese Cleghorn (1930-2009), Trustee Emeritus
News Release: Death of IJNR Trustee Reese Cleghorn

Reese was a distinguished professor of journalism who taught courses in ethics and persuasive writing at the University of Maryland in College Park. He was dean of the university's College of Journalism for two decades. Reese came to Maryland in 1981 from the Detroit Free Press after a 30-year career of reporting, editing and editorial writing at several newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal Constitution.

He co-authored the 1967 book, Climbing Jacob's Ladder, which examined the civil rights movement and the rise of black politics in the South. He also contributed to eight anthologies on racial, urban and other social problems and wrote more than 250 magazine articles. While dean, he led efforts that built Maryland 's journalism program into one of the nation's very best. As a result of his efforts, the college publishes American Journalism Review and operates the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the Hubert H. Humphrey Journalism Fellowships Program.

Abigail Holman, Trustee (Fayette, Maine)
We are deeply saddened that Abby Holman was killed in a skiing accident on April 7, 2007.

In Remembrance

Abby Holman won election in November 2006 to represent House District 83 in the Maine Legislature as a Republican. She was a former executive director of the Alliance for Maine's Future, an economic-development advocacy group, and of the Maine Forest Products Council. Prior to holding those jobs job, she practiced law at the Portland firm of Pierce Atwood, served as press secretary for U.S. Senate candidate Olympia Snowe, and worked as legislative director and counsel to then-Governor John R. McKernan. Abby was the widow of Andrew Weegar, who died in April 2005 at age 41. His and Abby's many contributions to IJNR are highlighted on our In Remembrance page.