BOARD OF DIRECTORS
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Saba Malik
Saba is the liaison and new member coordinator for Fertile Ground and has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2011. She studies herbal medicine and loves to spend time in the forest with her children. She identifies as a radical feminist and is passionately committed to organized political resistance.
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Cherry Smiley
Cherry Smiley, from the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) and Diné (Navajo) Nations, is a researcher, feminist activist, and artist who is working to end male violence against women and girls, particularly sexualized male violence against Indigenous women and girls. She is co-founder of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry, former member of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, and a PhD candidate at Concordia University in the field of Communications.
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Dillon ThomsonDillon is the lead lecturer and archivist for Fertile Ground. He has been an active member of Fertile Ground since its founding in 2008. Dillon's love for wildness and the diversity of life fuels his passion for resistance. He has honed his public speaking talents by lecturing for various classes at Western Washington University and along the west coast in preparation for a national tour in the fall of 2011.
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Max Wilbert
Max is the President of Fertile Ground and has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2009. His activism began in Seattle at a young age. In the summer of 2010, he traveled to Siberia as part of an international expedition to study and document the effects of global warming on the far north. He is trained in journalism and holds a BA in Environmental Advocacy and Communication from Huxley College.
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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 Masters degrees in Education and English Literature. Her website is located here.
Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He 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 admitted to practice in the United States Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 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), 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, 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, and he was named, in 2007, as one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries.” Linzey currently resides in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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 Masters degrees in Education and English Literature. Her website is located here.
Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He 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 admitted to practice in the United States Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, the U.S. District Court for the Western and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 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), 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, 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, and he was named, in 2007, as one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries.” Linzey currently resides in Gloucester, Massachusetts.