Board of Trustees
IJNR’s Board of Trustees establishes policies and provides strategic oversight and guidance for the organization. The board meets in person annually, and via conference call quarterly. Members serve staggered, three-year terms to ensure continuity of leadership.
Karen Scanlon, Chair (Melbourne, Fla.)
Karen is Executive Vice President of Environmental Stewardship for the Illinois-based Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, which is a unit of Dairy Management Inc. In that role, she is chiefly responsible for cultivating and strengthening partnerships for dairy sustainability. For 10 years, Karen served as executive director of the Conservation Technology Information Center, a national not-for-profit organization that encourages good conservation practices and habits in agriculture. Altogether, she has two decades of work experience in agriculture and conservation. She earned her journalism degree at the University of Florida and her master's degree in natural-resources management at The Ohio State University.
Danielle K. Brown, Vice Chair (East Lansing, Mich.)
Danielle K. Brown, Ph.D. is the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism Professor and an associate professor at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. An expert in the intersections of media, marginalized communities, and activism, she has presented her work in dozens of conferences and professional workshops around the world. She teaches courses related to diversity in mass communication and visual communication. Dr. Brown also consults with newsrooms around the U.S. about equitable media practices, and reporting on Black communities and civil rights protests. She received her B.A. and M.A. in journalism from Baylor University and her Ph.D. in journalism from The University of Texas-Austin. A gymnastics and soccer mom, she spends her spare time coordinating practice schedules and drop off times, and listening to audiobooks.
Barbara Dwyer, Treasurer (Lake Placid, N.Y.)
Barbara is a licensed Certified Public Accountant who has served on the New York State Society of CPAs and on an AICPA Technical Ethics Committee. She has taught seminars on various Federal income tax topics, served on local and regional school boards, a community college board of trustees as well as nonprofit boards over the years. She has traveled extensively in and outside the United States, including Alaska, New Zealand, Botswana, Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, Ireland, Italy, Egypt and Austria. She is an avid skier whose family has owned a cottage on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario for 100 years. Barbara has long been interested in the environment and is two peaks shy of being an Adirondack 46er (which the Googles tell us is someone who has climbed all 46 recognized high peaks in the Adirondacks!).
Nadia White, Secretary (Missoula, Mont.)
Nadia is Director of the Master’s Program in Environmental Science and Natural Resources Journalism at the University of Montana. She joined the faculty in 2006 after a career in newspaper journalism that included work throughout the West and in Washington, D.C.
Nadia specializes in environmental and public affairs journalism, and teaches courses in science journalism, global current events and reporting. She graduated from Bates College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a concentration in Asian literature. She earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Before coming to UM, Nadia reported for Maine’s Lewiston Sun, Minnesota’s Stillwater Gazette and the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo. She was a reporter and editor at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming and in the paper’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Nadia has received several awards for her reporting and writing, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award of Excellence for work on brucellosis in central Asia; the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Best Columnist of the Year Award; and several Associated Press Public Service awards. She received a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2004-05 and a World Affairs Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C., in 2003.
Donzell Brown, Trustee (Baltimore)
Donzell Brown is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative in Baltimore. A graduate of Oxford, Donzell honed his political and policy skills; first, in international intelligence, then, in policy and community engagement in Baltimore City and Maryland government. He currently serves as a Commissioner with the Baltimore Office of Sustainability. Throughout his more than 20 years of experience within the governmental sector, Donzell has been dedicated to advocacy, community engagement, and youth development.
John Flesher, Trustee (Traverse City, Michigan)
John retired in 2023 after a 42-year career as a reporter with The Associated Press, spent mostly in Michigan, where he focused on environmental issues in the Great Lakes region. He also was a member of AP's Global Environmental Beat Team, which involved coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Great Plains floods, Western wildfires and other breaking stories, plus award-winning investigative projects on topics such as oil well pollution, toxic algae and deficient flood-control levees. John's other AP postings were in Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, N.C., where he covered government and politics. He began his career as a reporter with the Goldsboro (N.C.) News-Argus. He was awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002-03 and participated in nearly a dozen IJNR expeditions and workshops. John earned a bachelor's degree in English at North Carolina State University, where he was editor of the student newspaper, the Technician. In retirement, he is a free-lance journalist and creative writer. His literary essays have been published in several Michigan journals.
Savi Horne, Trustee (Durham, North Carolina)
Savi is the Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers, Land Loss Prevention Project, which was created to provide legal expertise, community education, and advocacy skills to help farmers and rural landowners facing legal, economic, and environmental challenges. Savi received her B.A. in Urban Legal Studies from City College, City University of New York, and her J.D. from Rutgers.
David Rockland, Trustee (Centreville, Md.)
Dr. David Rockland launched Rockland Dutton Research & Consulting upon retiring in 2017 from the full-time role of Partner/CEO Ketchum Global Research & Analytics (KGRA). He fully retired in 2023. David has worked in fisheries, mining and magazine publishing, as well as non-profit management. With Times Mirror Magazines, he wrote a regular column on natural resources conservation that ran in all of the company’s 13 titles including Field &Stream, Outdoor Life, Golf Magazine, Yachting, Ski Magazine and Popular Science, as well as some ofthe parent company’s newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun. David and his wife Sarah Dutton, formerly with CBSNews, own a farm in Centreville, Maryland. They have dedicated the property to wildlife habitat enhancement and have put about 20 acres into forest buffer strips, and over 100 acres into a wetlands restoration program. They restored the 1789 farmhouse on the property and listed it on the National Register of Historic Places. He holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resource Economics from the University of Delaware. When not engaged with natural resource conservation and communications topics, David greatly enjoys spending time with his two grandkids.
Chris Salisbury, Trustee (Alexandria, Va.)
Christopher J. Salisbury is a partner with Watkinson Miller PLLC specializing in food, nutrition, and agriculture law, with a particular focus on agricultural sustainability matters. Chris began practicing law in 2005 after serving in numerous senior positions in both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. He has first-hand familiarity with Congress and the federal regulatory process, in addition to extensive experience in the broad-based representation of companies, associations, and others involved in food, nutrition, agribusiness, and agricultural sustainability efforts. Chris is an avid reader and enjoys spending time with his four young children.
Mark Trahant, Trustee (Phoenix)
Mark is editor-at-large of Indian Country Today. He has enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist, serving as editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in addition to working as a reporter at The Seattle Times, Arizona Republic, The Salt Lake Tribune, Moscow-Pullman Daily News, Navajo Times, Navajo Nation Today, Native Voice One, "Frontline" on PBS Frontline, and Sho-Ban News, a tribal newspaper in Idaho. As a co-author of a series on federal-Indian policy, Mark was a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He has also taught courses in healthcare reform, the American West, social media and editorial writing at public universities in Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota and Alaska. Mark has served as president of the Native American Journalists Association and in 2018 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mark is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Idaho.