As a kid growing up in Iowa, there were no oceans. What I initially learned about oceans was that there had been an ocean where Iowa is millions of years ago, and we went on a field trip to collect fossils of those long-dead small sea creatures.… Read More

By Teresa Clemmer

The trajectory of my life has always been more of a zigzag than a straight line.

I spent my early years living in San Diego, Miami, Tokyo, and Northern Virginia.  My teenage years were mostly in San Diego with my mom, but my sister and I took extended side trips to Jamaica, Venezuela, and Ecuador to spend time with our dad.  Then I went to college at Princeton in New Jersey, completed a year-long public interest fellowship in the San Francisco area, spent a second year in the Florida Keys, went to law school at Georgetown in Washington, DC, and then moved back to San Francisco cutting my teeth there as a young lawyer. 

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It’s always good to have something to celebrate when new folks come around. And we got great news with a court win within a week of welcoming back Teresa Clemmer, who worked with Trustees years ago and came back this month as our legal director. … Read More

Lydia Heye joined Trustees as a legal fellow in September 2022 after graduating from law school in Los Angeles. She took and passed the Alaska bar soon after, and she began lawyering in earnest. So what’s this about a quarter-life crisis?… Read More

Talking about the weather isn’t chitchat anymore.

When wildfires turn the sky apocalyptic orange hundreds of miles away, when floods turn city infrastructure to rubble, when heat makes walking outside lethal, it isn’t filler conversation—it is THE conversation. This is where sperm whales come in; when I feel disheartened, frustrated, angry at our species, I want to hang out with whales…… Read More

Rachel’s family knew she would be a lawyer before she did.

Her grandfather used to tell her that long before she knew a thing about the legal field, but she didn’t buy it—maybe because she didn’t like other people telling her what to do, or maybe because she was the family member who would argue with him about anything, or because she was just a kid with an imagination as broad and expansive as the future.

Whatever the case, no one doubted her penchant for advocacy.

Take the story of the shiny red shoes.… Read More

By Geoff Toy

I grew up running around in the woods near my childhood home along the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. I spent a lot of time outside.… Read More

Earlier this month, I joined my mom on her last—for now—“bucket list” adventure. We took the train to the Canadian Rocky Mountains for two days from Vancouver to Banff, going from an urban landscape and rainforest into high desert into boreal forest. Then we rented a car to spend some time in Lake Louise and Calgary. Stunning! And, because life works this way, I caught a virus at the end of this short-but-sweet trip.… Read More

At 28 and just a few years out of law school, Katie Strong left a policy-focused job in Yellowstone to work on the 2010 Pebble mine trial for Trustees for Alaska. She wanted to litigate and finally got her chance.… Read More