Beth Roach is a tribal leader, a farmer and surfer, a teacher and historian, an entrepreneur, fundraiser and environmental activist. For over a decade, she has served on the Tribal Council of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and led environmental initiatives. In 2018, she co-founded the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers, an emerging benefit corporation, to protect endangered Indigenous seeds and waterways. From 2018-2020, Beth chaired the inaugural Virginia Council on Environmental Justice; in 2020, Beth launched a tribal coastal resilience initiative with a team of scientists, policy makers, and tribal communities to implement climate adaptation strategies within the shared waters of Virginia and North Carolina. As a public fellow for UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory, she is capturing water stories from indigenous perspectives to assist in climate resiliency planning.
For the Sierra Club, Beth is a fundraiser and program lead for the Women’s Earth Alliance and Sierra Club’s US Grassroots Accelerator. Her past work includes chief ranger of interpretation for Virginia State Parks, grants manager for the James River Association and climate justice organizer for Mothers Out Front. Beth earned her bachelor’s degree in public history from James Madison University. She lives along the inner banks of the Albemarle Sound with her partner, cat, and many wildlife critters.
Karen McGlathery is Director of the Environmental Resilience Institute and Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is also Director of the Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research program, a collaboration of eight universities and 25 researchers funded by the U.S. government to understand how climate impacts coastal communities. She has previously held positions as Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, and visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the National Environmental Research institute in Denmark.
Her research focuses on the effects of climate change, nutrient pollution and species invasions on seagrass, seaweed and salt marsh ecosystems. Based on long-term research on carbon sequestration in restored seagrass meadows, her group wrote the international protocol for issuing carbon credits for seagrass restoration in the voluntary carbon market and their work led to government legislation in Virginia to allow carbon offset trading for seagrass restoration. In addition to Virginia, she and her students have worked in New England, Florida, Bermuda, Denmark, New Zealand, and Mozambique.
Willis Jenkins lives in the Rivanna River watershed (Monacan land), where he works as Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Jenkins co-directs UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory and Sanctuary Lab. He is the the author of two award-winning books on intersections of ethics, religion, and environment, including The Future of Ethics, which won an American Academy of Religion Award. Current research focuses on food ethics, religion & mass extinction, religion & climate change, and shifting senses of the sacred in Anthropocene landscapes.
Matthew Burtner (www.matthewburtner.