Advisory Board

Kenneth L. Adams

Kenneth Adams is head of the Antitrust and the Business Litigation Practices of Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP, in Washington, D.C. Throughout his thirty-five years of practice, Mr. Adams has concentrated on resolving the most complex and multifaceted disputes his four hundred-lawyer firm has been called upon to handle. Since 1989, Mr. Adams has served on the Executive Committee appointed by state and federal judges in Alaska to coordinate the litigation against Exxon Corporation on behalf of more than 40,000 plaintiffs who were injured in the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

José Roberto (Beto) Borges

Beto Borges was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the director of the Communities and Markets Program for Forest Trends, and previously worked as a program officer with the Goldman Environmental Foundation. Mr. Borges was the director of the Brazil Program at Rainforest Action Network for nine years, promoting forest policies and indigenous land demarcation in the Amazon region. He has consulted for philanthropic foundations and environmental organizations including the Damien Foundation, Global Greengrants Fund, Conservation International and the Centro de Pesquisa Indígena.

Stuart Kirsch

Stuart Kirsch is an anthropologist who has worked extensively on indigenous rights in the Pacific, especially in relation to the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea. He earned a doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. In 2007-08, he was a fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. Dr. Kirsch has consulted widely on environmental issues and land rights for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, and numerous NGOs and law firms.

Joshua Mailman

Joshua Mailman is internationally recognized as one of the leading social venture entrepreneurs and philanthropists in America. He is the founder of the Threshold Foundation, and a co-founder of the Network for Social Change U.K. Mr. Mailman has played an instrumental role in the founding of numerous organizations focused on business and social responsibility, including Social Venture Network, Business for Social Responsibility, and Social Venture Network Europe. He is a co-founder of Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh, the only phone company in the world one-third owned by a bank that represents the interests of the poor.

David Rothschild

David Rothschild is a program officer with the Skoll Foundation, and a former program officer with the Goldman Environmental Foundation, where he was responsible for the Africa and Latin America areas of the Goldman Environmental Prize. For four years, Mr. Rothschild was the director of the Amazon Alliance, a strategic partnership between environmental, human rights and indigenous organizations of the Amazon Basin. He has lived and worked extensively in Latin America, where he led community development and conservation initiatives.

Tom Sargent

Tom Sargent is a real estate developer and city planner specializing in environmentally responsible projects located in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a principal in Equity Community Builders, LLC (ECB). ECB's portfolio includes the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio of San Francisco, the David Brower Center in Berkeley, and the Retreat at Fort Baker in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Mr. Sargent has served on the Board of Directors of the New Field Foundation, a supporting organization of the Tides Foundation, focused on international grantmaking at the grass-roots level.

Cosette Thompson

Cosette Thompson worked for Amnesty International USA for over twenty years, nine of those years as the organization's Western Regional Director, based in San Francisco. Her work included developing or coordinating numerous projects in the areas of human rights education and the protection of environmental activists. Ms. Thompson now works as an independent human rights researcher and consultant based in Tucson. She earned a doctoral degree from the University of La Sorbonne, and taught at the University of Orleans (France) and the International French-American School in San Francisco.

Durwood Zaelke

Durwood Zaelke is the founding Director of the Secretariat for the International Network for Environmental Compliance & Enforcement, and the Resident Managing Partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the international law firm, Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette, LLP. He is the founder (1989) and past President (1989- 2003) of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), and the founder and President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development. He is the author of the leading law school textbook on International Environmental Law.

EDLC could not do its work without the help and inspiration of the members of its exceptionally experienced and talented Advisory Board.

- EDLC staff