Richard Louv

Richard Louv is chairman of the Children & Nature Network and the author of seven books, including his most recent, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin). He is the recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal. Past recipients have included Rachel Carson, E.O. Wilson and Jimmy Carter. He has served as an adviser to the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award program, is a member of the Citistates Group, appears often on national radio and television programs, and speaks frequently in the United States and overseas. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers and magazines, and was a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and Parents magazine. Married to Kathy Frederick Louv, he is the father of two young men, Jason and Matthew. He is working on his eighth book, but would rather be fishing.

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Cheryl Charles, Ph.D.

Cheryl Charles, Ph.D., is co-chair of the Education for Sustainable Development Working Group of the Commission on Education and Communication, World Conservation Union (IUCN-CEC). Cheryl is an innovator, educator, author and organizational executive. Cheryl served for close to 20 years as national director of the two most widely used environment education programs in North America, Project Learning Tree and Project WILD, and has received numerous awards for her leadership.

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Martin LeBlanc

Martin LeBlanc is national youth education director for the Sierra Club, where he oversees the organization’s youth programs and advocacy efforts relating to children and nature. His advocacy work has been focused, for the most part, on California, New Mexico and Washington State, as well as at the federal level. Martin also has been instrumental in forming partnerships with military and health organizations around the issue of children and nature. He was a founding board member of the Children and Nature Network. Previously, Martin worked as an outdoor educator in Seattle, and served as an outdoor-education advocate for Texas Parks and Wildlife in Austin, Texas. He is currently chairman of the No Child Left Inside committee in Washington State, as well as a member of the North American Association for Environmental Education's Advocacy Committee. Martin believes that "the next generation of American children deserves a special place in nature so they can be empowered to solve the environmental challenges of the future."

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Martha Farrell Erickson, Ph.D.

Martha Farrell Erickson, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota, where she is Director of the Irving B. Harris Training Programs in the Center for Early Education & Development and Co-Chair of the President's Initiative on Children, Youth & Families. A developmental psychologist specializing in parent-child attachment, child abuse prevention, and children's mental health, Marti is a well-known speaker and author in those fields and has been honored by state and national organizations for her outstanding contributions to psychology. With an interest in translating research for general audiences, Marti also appears weekly on Twin Cities television and hosts a weekly radio show, "Good Enough Moms," with her daughter, Erin Erickson Garner. Marti is passionate about the role of nature in children's development and hopes to spur not only a movement to reunite children with the natural world, but also more rigorous, extensive research on this critical topic in human development.

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Amy Pertschuk

Amy Pertschuk is managing director of C&NN and part of the strategic planning and implementation team. She designed and developed C&NN's online strategy and continues to manage the ever-expanding Web site resources to serve the needs of the growing children and nature movement. Her work includes outreach and communications with network members as well as grassroots leadership. She also serves as a member of the board of directors of Hooked on Nature, and was a co-founder of eNature.com, the Web’s premier nature-discovery resource: www.enature.com

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Mike Pertschuk

From 1966-70, Mike Pertschuk served as Consumer Counsel (later Staff Director and Chief Counsel) to the Democratic Majority of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce. In that capacity, he was charged with shepherding through the Senate, and Senate-House Conferences, the series of landmark consumer protection, public health, and environmental laws that marked the high point in public interest legislation for the last half of the 20th century. To achieve these successes, Pertschuk learned from and collaborated with Ralph Nader and other innovative consumer advocates to develop and implement a strategic communications strategy that counteracted the intense opposition of the corporate lobbies and pro-corporate legislators. In 1977, Mike Pertschuk was named by President Carter as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with a mandate to enforce many of these laws. In the face of a growing tide of anti-regulatory fervor, Pertschuk, as Chair, pursued a series of aggressive regulatory initiatives, including his proposed rule banning all advertising targeted to children. In 1984, along with David Cohen, former President of Common Cause, Pertschuk created the Advocacy Institute, to build the capacity of citizen groups to advocate policies in the public interest. Central to the Institute’s work over the next 20 years was the training of hundreds of community-based advocates in “Media Advocacy,” a concept and term credited to Pertschuk. He has written more than 20 guides on media advocacy and four books on effective – and ineffective – strategies for citizen advocacy, especially media advocacy. He is a founding Board member of The Frameworks Institute and an advisor to Environics Strategic Initiatives Forum.

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