Board Member Name, Location. Officer Status (Year Installed on Board)
Richard Kamp, Santa Fe, New Mexico USA. President (2003). Director, E-Tech International, 2003-present; Environmental Bureau Chief, Wick Newspaper chain 2005-present; Director, Border Ecology Project 1983-2005 (coauthor US-Mexico La Paz agreement hazardous waste and copper smelting accords 1987); Purpose Prize Fellow Award, 2011; UNEP global youth award, 1991.
Holly Dressel, Montreal, Canada. Director (2003). Author, journalist, filmmaker, writer for television and radio, and frequent co-author with environmentalist and CBC Nature of Things host David Suzuki; adjunct professor, McGill School of the Environment, McGill University, Montreal; long history working with indigenous and traditional communities in Canada and elsewhere.
Peter Kostishack, Boulder, Colorado USA. Director (2012). Director of Programs, Global Greengrants Fund; long history supporting communities and indigenous organizations in defense of rights, territories, and natural resources; coordinated the Amazon Alliance, a coalition of indigenous and non-governmental organizations protecting the Amazon Basin.
Ann Maest PhD, Boulder, Colorado USA. Director (2003). Aqueous Geochemist with specialty in the environmental effects of mining and oil & gas development. Chief Scientist, E-Tech International, 2003-present; Vice President, Buka Environmental, 1995-present; Managing Scientist, Stratus Consulting, 2006-2013; Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund DC, 1989-1991; Research Geochemist, US Geological Survey, Menlo Park CA, 1983-89. PhD Geochemistry and Water Resources, Princeton University.
Paxty Weddy Tananta Melendez is Director of a Peruvian nonprofit, E-Tech Peru, that is 100% independent of E-Tech International. He is the legal representative of E-Tech/COAM, the consortium between E-Tech and Conciencia Ambiental a Peruvian environmental consulting firm that began in 2021-2022 implementing government contracts in Loreto, Peru for capacity building and training in the areas of environmental remediation and communal business at the request of the indigenous federations. By 2023 the goal is for E-Tech Peru to begin managing this long-term training project. He has a degree in accounting and finance from the Universidad Católica los Ángeles de Chimbote.
Paxty divides his time between Iquitos and Lima, Peru and is a certified accountant specializing in International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation Standards. He is a certified accountant, financial, tax and labor advisor with his own firm. Paxty’s for-profit firm helps and advises companies on issues of health, occupational safety, marketing and care for the environment. Working with E-Tech/COAM he currently provides accounting, financial, labor and administrative advice to companies in the Native communities of the Pastaza, Corrientes, Tigre and Marañón basins and coordinates group training workshops. He has been conducting all Peruvian accounting as a consultant to E-Tech International.
Laura Silvan, Tijuana, México. Director (2003). Program Director, E-Tech International; Executive Director, Fundación La Puerta, Baja California, México 2007-11; Plan Developer, Environmental Education Plan for Baja California 2012- 2013; Director, Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental, 1988-2007; Joint Public Advisory Committee, Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Ottawa, Canada.
Tami Okamoto is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Geography. Her work focuses on the production of autonomous indigenous territories in the northern Peruvian Amazon. This encompasses research that re-centres indigenous geographies among the Wampis Nation—the first indigenous autonomous territorial government in Peru—while drawing on critical geographies of indigeneity (to think through how indigeneity is made as such and is reworked as it bounds to an autonomous territory).
Tami’s current work builds upon over ten years of collaboration with Amazonian indigenous organizations and autonomous governments at the interface of academia, policy-related work, and on-the-ground territorial struggles and negotiations. Tami has facilitated multisectoral, interdisciplinary, and intercultural approaches to environmental remediation, health, and water governance in Amazonian indigenous territories affected by over half a century of oil extraction. She has co-authored peer-reviewed articles and policy-related books and reports on these topics as well as on participation, consultation, oil extraction, and indigenous territorial governance. She has lectured on the Geographies of Postcolonialism and Decoloniality at the University of Cambridge and on Indigenous Territories and Politics at the Catholic University of Peru. She has been guest lecturer, led seminars, and supervised on anthropocene studies, political ecology, development theories, policies, and practices, sustainable development, and environmental justice in these universities, the University of Oslo and the University of California Santa Cruz. She also facilitates modules in the Escuela Sharian, a youth training initiative autonomously-led by the Wampis Government. Integral to her work has been a longstanding commitment to continuous dialogue and collaboration with local interlocutors, with particular concern of indigenous groups’ distinct decision-making and governance structures.
Denise Humphreys Bebbington is Research Associate Professor in the Department of International Development, Community and Environment at Clark University in Massachusetts, USA. She is Co-Director for the Center for the Study of Natural Resources Extraction and Society at Clark, Faculty Convener of a new Earth conversation at Clark, and an affiliate faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her research has explored the political ecology of natural gas in Bolivia and the implications of the gas economy for both indigenous peoples and regional societies, the dynamics of socio environmental conflict and mobilization linked to natural resource extraction and large-scale infrastructure investments, and the relationship between gender, environment and development, specifically how women gain access to and control over natural resources. She collaborated on the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA) Amazon Assessment Report 2021, and co-led a global scoping study on Extractive Industries, Infrastructure Development, Forest Loss and Forest Community Rights for the Climate and Land Use Alliance in Amazonia, Central America, Mexico and Indonesia. Prior to her academic research she served as Representative to Peru for the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), South American Regional Sub-Director for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and Latin America Program Coordinator for the Global Greengrants Fund (GGF).
