Experts

Lindsey Allen 
Forest Campaigner

Since 2005, Lindsey has campaigned to protect ancient forests, with a focus on the North American Boreal forest and the Amazon rainforest.

Lindsey is currently focusing on our Kleercut campaign, which works to pressure tissue giant Kimberly-Clark to stop using ancient forests to make Kleenex and other tissue products. Lindsey has been instrumental in persuading more than a dozen major colleges and universities to cancel their contracts with Kimberly-Clark.

Lindsey is also an expert on protecting the Amazon rainforest. Her focus includes illegal logging, soy cultivation, cattle grazing, and land-grabs. Prior to her work on the forest campaign, she lauched the Greenpeace Student Network, the national body for college student engagement on Greenpeace campaigns.

• Listen to Lindsey discuss threats to the Amazon rainforest on Public Radio International's "Living on Earth"

 

Willem Beekman
Marine Projects Manager

Willem coordinates U.S. tours for Greenpeace's fleet of ships. His duties include providing nautical information, scheduling ships, and advising campaigns on using those ships.

Before joining Greenpeace at sea, Willem was an Officer in both the Dutch Merchant Marine and the Dutch navy. He then went on to study architecture and worked as an architect in the private housing industry. In 1981, Beekman joined the volunteer crew of the Rainbow Warrior as a second-mate to protest seal-hunts in Labrador, Canada. For seven years, Willem took part in Greenpeace voyages, mostly as captain of another Greenpeace ship, the Sirus, including the famous Sellafield protest in Northwest Britain in 1987 and protests against nuclear waste dumping in the Atlantic in the early 1980s.

Willem was the Director of Rainbow Warrior Holdings from 1989 to 1993, where he coordinated the travel of Greenpeace's fleet, which then included seven ships, two helicopters, a yacht, a hot-air balloon, and a campaign bus. Willem got involved with Greenpeace again in 1997, doing action-logistcs and research, managing Action Teams both in the Netherlands and the U.S., and acting as Director of Stichting Marine Services, the current manager of Greenpeace ships.

Kert Davies
Research Director

Kert directs Greenpeace's research team. He works closely with investigative journalists and frequently represents Greenpeace at international climate negotiations and scientific conferences. Kert has also partnered with major global corporations to help them implement solutions to global environmental problems. In 2008, he served as part of a team that convinced Unilever to introduce the first climate-friendly freezers into the United States. He also created and runs the Greenpeace website and blog ExxonSecrets.org, which exposes how Exxon Mobil and other polluters have attempted to influence the public debate about global warming.

Kert is a regular source for national and international reporters in his areas of expertise, which include global warming, clean energy, corporate environmental policy and lobbying, and toxics issues. He has been quoted in The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, The Financial Times, The Baltimore Sun, People, Business Week, and many other national and international publications. His TV and radio appearances include CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, ABC, CBS, and Voice of America.

Kert studied environmental studies at Hampshire College, and received his master's in environmental studies from the University of Montana in 1994. Kert began his environmental career while studying the science and policy of pesticides as a graduate student at the University of Montana, becoming an analyst and researcher for the Pesticide Action Network and the Environmental Working Group. While at the Environmental Working Group from 1994 to 1998, he focused primarily on food residues and methyl bromide, a pesticide associated with ozone layer depletion. In 1998, Kert became the Science Policy Director of Ozone Action, which merged with Greenpeace in 2000.

Molly Dorozenski
Media Officer

Molly is our New York-based media officer and works with national print, broadcast, and online media. Before coming to Greenpeace in 2008, she was a senior publicist at Scribner, where she worked with authors such as Steve Martin, Lee Iacocca, Craig Unger, Rick Perlstein and Annie Proulx. She has a B.A. in English from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Larry Edwards
Alaska Forest Campaigner

Larry, based in Greenpeace's Sitka, Alaska field office, campaigns to protect the Alaska's Tongass Rainforest and roadless areas in national forests around the country. He also works with Forest Stewardship Council on issues related to sustainable certification of timber.

Larry is currently working to show how logging in the Tongass National Forest affects the viability of southeastern Alaska's unique wolf subspecies (the Alexander Archipelago wolf) and the availability of deer to subsistence hunters. Larry's work led to a July 2008 lawsuit, still in process, against four Tongass timber sales authorized by the U.S. Forest Service based on flawed research.

• Listen to Larry discuss the Tongass National Forest on Alaska Public Radio

 

Lisa Finaldi
National Campaigns Director

Lisa joined Greenpeace in 1990 as the international toxics campaign director, based in Amsterdam. During her tenure, Greenpeace launched a global campaign to stop the siting of land-based incineration of toxic waste, work that followed a successful Greenpeace campaign that stopped plans to burn toxic waste at sea.

Lisa spearheaded the Greenpeace International Chlorine-Free campaign, pressuring governments and industry to reduce and eliminate industrial uses of chlorinated chemicals. This work focused on the elimination of chlorine in the production of paper products, PVC plastic and dry cleaning. Lisa is responsible for the 1998 Greenpeace campaign that alerted families around the world to the toxic chemicals found in PVC or vinyl toys. As a result, the European Union, Canada, and countries in Latin America and Asia, and eventually the United States banned toxic additives in children's toys.

She has held her current position as national campaigns' director since 2004. Before her work at Greenpeace, Finaldi served as the executive director of the Clean Water Fund of North Carolina and executive director of the national Sierra Club's Radioactive Waste Campaign from 1981-1985. At the Sierra Club, she worked to successfully pass state legislation that ensured the first nuclear waste reprocessing plant in West Valley, New York would never reopen after it was closed due to serious leaks.

Rick Hind
Legislative Director

Since 1991, Rick has been legislative director of Greenpeace's toxics campaign. He is one of the nation's foremost experts on a variety of toxics issues, including security issues related to chemical hazards and the chemical industry, EPA regulations pertaining to toxic incineration, the pulp and paper industry, PVC plastics, and toxic pollutants. He has testified before Congress on multiple occasions and helped lead our successful global campaign to ban some of the world's most dangerous chemicals and prevent new ones from being marketed.

Rick is a go-to source for journalists covering toxics and chemical security issues. He has been quoted in a wide range of national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, NPR, FOX, and many others.

Rick's work to expose the vulnerability of U.S. chemical plants to terrorism and accidents resulted in a feature story on the CBS program 60 Minutes in November 2003. He was also the subject of a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal in January, 2004.

• Watch Rick on the NBC Nightly News.
• Rick on Democracy Now

 

John Hocevar
Oceans Campaign Director

A trained marine biologist and an accomplished campaigner, explorer, and marine scientist, John has helped win several major victories for marine conservation since becoming the director of Greenpeace's oceans campaign in 2004.

He directed a campaign that secured the first cap on factory fishing for menhanden in the Chesapeake Bay (menhanden is the second largest fishery in the United States). He then led a successful campaign to persuade the Bush administration to scrap its plans to eliminate important fisheries protections. During the past three years, facing multi-million dollar opposition from the fishing industry, John's team won successively lower catch levels for the pollock fishery, the world's largest food fishery.

In 2007, John led an expedition to the Bering Sea that employed submarines to conduct the first manned exploration of the world's largest underwater canyon. He and his team discovered a new species of sponge, and documented many corals and sponges that were not previously known to live in the Bering Sea.

On the international level, John helped persuade the United Nations to protect coral reefs and other sensitive ecosystems from bottom trawling and other destructive fishing practices, and helped secure an agreement from eight Pacific island nations to prohibit fishing in large areas of the Pacific Ocean. He has also played a leading role in Greenpeace's global anti-whaling campaign, successfully persuading the Japanese to drop plans to hunt humpback whales and to end all private investment in Japan's whaling industry.

John has been featured on many national TV and radio networks, including CNN, BBC, ABC, NBC, Fox, and NPR, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Science, New Scientist, Salon, Washington Post, The Times of London, and many others.

Prior to joining Greenpeace, John was involved in several environmental projects including the Sea Turtle Nesting Project in Florida, Coral Cay Conservation in Belize, and as an environmental educator for Marine Science Under Sails in Florida. He is a graduate of the Green Corps organizing fellowship, a program dedicated to training the next generation of environmental leaders and previously worked at Corporate Accountability International. He is a co-founder and former executive director of Students for a Free Tibet.

• Watch a video of John discussing his Bering Sea expedition

 

Claudette Juska
Research Specialist

An engineer with experience in the auto industry, Claudette brings her technical background to the Greenpeace research team, covering issues including car and truck fuel efficiency policies, refrigeration, air quality, seafood, and corporate efforts to "greenwash" (or improperly portray themselves as green), as well as a range of other topics.

Before joining Greenpeace, Claudette was the Clean Car Campaign coordinator for the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Part of a national movement, the Clean Car Campaign advocates for reform in automotive chemicals policy, promoting sustainable plastics, and evaluating the health and safety of cars. Claudette analyzed economic, political, and technical implications of legislative proposals to reduce carbon and other emissions, and collaborated with government agencies and environmental health campaigns to implement better policies for the region. During her time with the Clean Car Campaign, Claudette completed her masters in environmental policy at the University of Michigan, where she researched tourism in Guatemala and its impact on local populations and ecosystems in the Mayan jungle.

From 2000 to 2003, Claudette served in the U.S. Peace Corps as an environmental conservation volunteer in Serenje, Zambia, where she served as a conservation specialist for urban and rural communities, organizing and facilitating conservation workshops and mobilizing communities to implement sustainable farming practices. She also trained community leaders in identifying and preventing environmental problems like deforestation and water contamination.

Before the Peace Corps, Juska was an engineer at the Ford Motor Company through the Ford College Graduate Program. She took on a variety of positions in this capacity, including project manager, body design engineer, and quality supervisor, which fostered the research experience and technical expertise that she would bring to the environmental movement.

Scott Paul

Forest Campaign Director

Scott is currently leading the Kleercut campaign, which works to reform the procurement policies of Kimberly-Clark, the world's largest tissue company. He also directs the MusicWood campaign, which partners Greenpeace with five of the world's most famous guitar manufacturers to leverage on-the-ground changes in forest management.

Scott moved to Washington D.C. in 1993 to work for the Office of Environmental Policy for the White House. There he worked with Latin American governments on important initiatives following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. That experience led to a position with the Global Forest Policy Project (GFPP), a joint venture of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and the National Wildlife Federation.

Since 1998, Scott has been integral to a diverse range of Greenpeace national and global campaigns. Scott's work has taken him to remote forest regions from the Amazon to Siberia and to corporate and government meetings from Tokyo to Rome, where he continues to raise awareness and fight against illegal and destructive logging. In addition to his responsibilities at Greenpeace, he also serves on the Board of Directors for the Forest Stewardship Council-U.S., the world's premiere forest certification system.

Scott is active in our global campaign to protect ancient forests which aims to stop the import of wood from destructive and illegal logging operations into the United States. In April 2002, Scott participated in a peaceful protest in the port of Miami against a ship carrying illegal Brazilian mahogany in violation of Brazilian and international law. For this act, Scott became the first person in over 100 years to be convicted of "sailor mongering", an archaic law from 1872. Later, in a decision completely without precedent – and in what eventually became a nationally covered First Amendment post-September 11 case – the federal government prosecuted Greenpeace as an organization for the Miami protest. After a three-day trial, the judge granted acquittal and dismissed the case.

Scott has been quoted in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Business Week, Washington Post, Miami Herald, and the PBS News Hour, CNN, BBC, NPR, and many others.

• "Guitar makers are strumming a new tune" The Houston Chronicle, January 26, 2009
• "Saving Trees Is Music to Guitar Makers' Ears"; The New York Times, June 7, 2007
• "U.S. Takes Hard Line on Greenpeace"; MSNBC

 

Phil Radford
Executive Director

Phil is an expert in energy policy, grassroots mobilization, campaign planning, national field organizing, fundraising, and organizational strategy, with specialties in solar electricity policy, non-profit management, and national canvass management.  As Grassroots Director at Greenpeace, he manages Greenpeace's student, online, and field organizing teams.  

In 2006, he launched and built Greenpeace USA's $9 million Grassroots Program, which included a cutting edge online to on-the-ground organizing team, a student organizing and training program, and the national street and door-to-door canvass program.  Part of the student program includes Greenpeace Organizing Term, where 100 students are trained in the art of organizing, campaign planning, and campus organizing.

Prior to joining Greenpeace in 2003, Phil founded Power Shift, where he served as executive director of a grassroots organization dedicated to driving clean energy market breakthroughs and building the grassroots base to stop global warming.  In that capacity, he worked with the cities of San Diego, Chula Vista, Berkeley, and others to secure solar and energy efficiency investments for municipal buildings. He secured a commitment from Citigroup to offer and market energy efficient mortgages to make solar and residential wind affordable for the majority of American homeowners. 

As field Director of Ozone Action from 1999 to 2001, Radford planned and managed a successful grassroots organizing campaign in the 2000 presidential primaries that convinced Senator John McCain to push for action to combat global warming. He organized students around divestment and brought 230 U.S. students to the Kyoto negotiations, convincing the U.S. delegation to stop pushing for nuclear energy in the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.   

Phil earned a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998, and holds a certificate in Non-profit Management from Georgetown University. 

Bill Richardson
Deputy Director

Bill serves as a liaison to the Greenpeace Board of Directors, working on major gift fundraising efforts, leading the Senior Management Team in developing long-term planning for Greenpeace USA, and working with Greenpeace International on the organization's global strategic framework.

Bill was hired by Greenpeace in 1988 as a canvasser, and spent several years going door-to-door, asking for donations and spreading the word about Greenpeace’s mission. But since 1994, Bill has worked in Greenpeace's DC headquarters, a place that he loves.

He should – he helped select it.

When Greenpeace started a two-year project to relocate the national headquarters in Washington to a more environmentally friendly office space, Bill was hired to coordinate these efforts. The space he helped create has won numerous awards and continues to draw attention from other agencies and individuals interested in “green” design and architecture. In fact, Bill was a featured speaker at the 2001 EnvironDesign conference in Atlanta and has been quoted in publications such as Interiors and Sources, Perspective, and the Washington Business Journal that featured articles about the Greenpeace office.

From 2000 to 2003, Bill served as campaign operations manager. During that time, he helped launch our nationwide volunteer outreach program. The program currently involves thousands of volunteers on college campuses and in communities across the country.

In addition to the positions Bill has held during his time at Greenpeace, he has participated in numerous direct actions on behalf of the organization. In 1992, he climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago on the 50th anniversary of the first sustained nuclear reaction, and in 1995 he climbed the cooling tower of the Fermi nuclear power plant in Monroe, MI on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Both events were designed to protest the threats posed by nuclear power and weaponry. In 2006, Bill was on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean, as part of the campaign to stop illegal fishing and over-fishing in that part of the world.

Kate Rooth
Research Coordinator

In 2005, Kate began her work for Greenpeace as a climate and clean energy intern, working to get America's first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind, approved.

She then took Greenpeace back to her campus, Lehigh University, working as a campus fellow. At Lehigh, she organized students to join a national campaign to remove Kimberly-Clark tissue products from their universities. Upon graduation, she became Greenpeace's executive assistant.

In her current role on the research team, Kate exposes how polluting corporations secretly fund PR efforts to deny global warming or block solutions. She is a contributing writer for www.StopGreenwash.org and www.Coal-Is-Dirty.org.

In addition to her formal duties, Kate is committed to non-violent direct action and has participated in direct actions across the country with Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Rising Tide North America.

Rolf Skar
Senior Forest Campaigner

As a senior forest campaigner, Rolf contributes to international campaigns to reduce illegal logging and global warming through protecting forests in the Canadian Boreal, Paradise region of Southeast Asia, and Brazilian Amazon. Previously, Rolf was campaign director for the Siskiyou Project in Portland, Oregon, where he directed outreach, media, and political work to permanently protect the 1.2 million acre Siskiyou Wild Rivers region. He currently volunteers as a consultant and outreach educator at Recycling Advocates and as a volunteer trainer and board advisor at BARK, a grassroots forest preservation organization.

Before joining Greenpeace in 2002, Rolf took charge of Portland-area outreach programs and volunteer recruitment and training for the Northwest Earth Institute. While in the AmeriCorps National Service program in 1997, Skar created an award winning waste reduction program at Clackamas High School in Portland, providing environmental education and mentoring for at-risk youth.