Judy Geer, Morrisville

Judy Geer graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Ecology and a new favorite sport: Rowing. She went on to compete on three US Olympic Rowing Teams in ’76, ’80 and ’84.  In 1983, she earned a Masters in Engineering from Dartmouth and then joined Concept2, which had been started in 1976 by Dick Dreissigacker (now her husband) and his brother Peter.  She is currently a member of the Marketing and Communications Team. In 2009, Judy and Dick purchased the Craftsbury Outdoor Center and turned it into a non-profit with a mission that combines lifelong sports, sustainability and stewardship. The Center is using both solar and biomass now, and the goal is to further reduce its use of fossil fuels in the next few years.  At home, a solar tracker provides most of their electricity, and domestic hot water is heated by a homemade gasifying wood chip boiler burning homemade chips.  Judy has been a member of the Morristown School Board for over 15 years, has also been active in Early Education, and is a board member of the New England Nordic Ski Association. Judy & Dick live in Morrisville in the winter and in a cabin in Albany, VT in the summer.  They have three grown children: Hannah, Emily & Ethan.
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Elizabeth Humstone, Charlotte
Ever since as a child she read The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, Beth has been concerned with the effects of sprawl on America’s suburbs, small towns and rural landscapes.  After receiving her masters degree in City Planning from Harvard University in 1973, she came to Vermont to work with the state’s land use laws and programs.  Over the next 38 years, she became an expert on ways to achieve smart growth and limit sprawl development. She is currently an urban planning consultant, an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she chairs the Board of Advisors Public Policy Task Force, and a columnist for Planning Commissioners’ Journal.  Formerly, she was the Executive Director of the Vermont Forum on Sprawl (later Smart Growth Vermont), Director of U.S. Programs for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, Chair of the Board of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund and President of the national Growth Management Leadership Alliance. She was recently a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Maine and is now associated with Boston Architectural College. Ms Humstone authored with Julie Campoli and Alex MacLean, Above and Beyond, Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas (Planners Press, 2002).  Although her primary residence is in Charlotte, Vermont, she also divides her time between Portland, Maine where she is a member of the Board of Directors for the Portland Downtown District and chairs their Advocacy Committee, and Concord, Massachusetts where her partner, Stanly Black, lives. She has one grown son, Christopher C. Gignoux.
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Pete Land, Burlington Pete Land is a native of Burlington. He received his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies in 1999 from Dartmouth College and a Master of Environmental Management degree in 2003 from Yale University. Pete was VNRC’s Mollie Beattie Intern during the summer of 2002, focusing on the reclassification of important wetlands. Pete also worked for the San Diego Zoological Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and a black bear sanctuary in Minnesota. Today, Pete is the co-owner of Tamarack Media, an environmental media production company based in Burlington. Tamarack has produced videos, websites, and print materials for over 100 environmental organizations, schools, and businesses around the country. In addition to VNRC, Pete serves on the Boards of the Vermont Land Trust and Wild Gift, an Idaho-based network of better-world entrepreneurs. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program. Pete is committed to diversifying and strengthening the environmental movement through communication strategies that unite rather than divide. He lives in Burlington with his wife, Emily and their dog, Willy.
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Bill Roper, Weybridge
Bill has been with the Orton Family Foundation since 1998. After graduating from Williams College in 1977, Bill traveled around the world for two years, eventually settling in Vermont and graduating from Vermont Law School in 1983. For the next 14 years, he practiced law in a private firm in Middlebury, Vermont and became a prominent land use attorney focusing on creative and thoughtful local community planning, as well as on sound economic and environmental development in the private market. Bill served on VNRC’s Board in the 1990’s including two years as its Chair before stepping off to represent VNRC in its first successful battle against the St. Albans Wal-Mart proposal.  In 1997-1998, Bill lived with his wife and two daughters on the west coast of Ireland where he spearheaded changes to Ireland's land use practices and regulations, helped form Ireland's first land trust and worked on several local projects. During his thirteen years with the Foundation, Bill served as the Foundation's Director of Programs until becoming the President and CEO in 2006. He has written articles for the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review and the Vermont Law Review and has authored a chapter on the Foundation's groundbreaking planning software for the edited volume, Conservation in the Internet Age (Island Press, 2002).  Bill has lead the creation of the Foundation’s $10M Heart and Soul Community Planning Initiative, which includes the use of art to engage citizens and further their expression of what they value in their community (Art and Soul).  Bill lives with his family in Weybridge, Vermont and serves on the Weybridge Planning Commission and the board of Smart Growth Vermont until its recent merger with VNRC.
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Elizabeth Skarie, Williston
A native of Minnesota, Elizabeth moved to Vermont in 1978, when her boyfriend, now husband, Jerry Greenfield, opened an ice cream parlor in Burlington.  Since then, she has worked as a registered nurse, a mental health counselor and a psychologist.  In 1987 she joined with neighbors to reactivate Williston Citizens for Responsible Growth.  After successfully fighting the building of a shopping mall in town, WCRG worked with Williston officials and the developer to design a town center.   Elizabeth ran for the Vermont Legislature in 2000. Now a Williston Planning Commissioner, Elizabeth joined the VNRC board in 1998.  Elizabeth and Jerry have one son, Tyrone.
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Greg Strong, Burlington
Greg has twelve years of experience designing, developing, assessing, and marketing renewable energy, and energy efficiency technologies and services. Greg currently serves as president of Spring Hill Solutions, LLC, a clean energy and carbon reduction consulting firm based in Burlington, Vermont. Through his work at Spring Hill, Greg provides a host of services, including system design and integration, project management, research, strategy development, business development, and commercialization in the clean energy, carbon management, and intellectual property strategy fields. Greg holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University  of Arizona and is a published writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He is an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School, the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Winter Mountaineering School, and the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Mountain Leadership  School. He lives in Burlington with his fun, gorgeous, and inspiring family: Jena, Aviva, Pearl, and Juke.
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Gerry Tarrant, Montpelier
Gerry is a partner in the Montpelier law firm Tarrant, Gillies, Merriman & Richardson.  A former Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service (1985-88), he has been practicing law in Montpelier ever since.  One of Gerry’s greatest honors was being named co-citizen of the year by VNRC in 1990.  Gerry’s practice emphasizes environmental, land use and zoning law before municipal and Act 250 district commissions and the Environmental Court, as well as utility practice before the Public Service Board.  His utility practice involves energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.  He focuses on trial and appellate practice as well as transactional matters.  He is the Chair of the Environmental Section of the VBA and has a special love for historic preservation and the Vermont countryside.  Gerry lives in Montpelier with his daughter Grace and her dog Brownie.  His son Michael and his wife Yoko reside in Montpelier.  Mike will be finishing his third year at VLS after teaching English as a second language in Kyoto, Japan for seven years.  Yoko teaches at the Montessori School in Montpelier.
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Eric Zencey, Montpelier
Eric Zencey is a novelist, essayist, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Historical and Political Inquiry in the Graduate and International Programs of Empire State College, State University of New York. His teaching duties take him regularly to Prague, Cyprus, and other program locations, where he supervises students and faculty in environmental history, ecological economics, and sustainability studies. Having grown up in a small town on salt marshes of the Delaware Bay, he found the rural life of Vermont very familiar when he moved to a hilltop farm in Woodbury in 1980, “despite,” he says, “the fact that as ecosystems go, coastal marshes are very different from northern forest.” He has been thinking, writing, and teaching about environmental issues since entering graduate school in political theory in the late 1970s, and is the author of two books: the historical novel Panama, and Virgin Forest, a collection of essays about how we think about—and ought to think about—culture’s root in nature. His writing has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller-Bellagio, and Bogliasco Foundations. He and his wife, the novelist Kathryn Davis, make their home in Montpelier, except during the spring semester, when she serves as the Senior Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Don Hooper, Sharon
National Wildlife Federation Liaison

At Harvard, then in Botswana (Peace Corps ‘69-‘71), Don imbibed Chief Seattle’s admonition that we haven’t so much “inherited this planet from our parents as we’ve borrowed it from our children”.  Later, as a gung-ho college teacher, a hippie goat farmer who helped found the Montpelier Farmers Market, a think-outside-the-dots legislator, a “count every vote” Secretary of State, and an ardent lifelong “intelligent tinkerer conservationist” (Aldo Leopold urges us to ‘save all the parts’), Don has always thought it a good idea to try to leave the planet a better place than he found it.  Now, as a New England Regional Representative for the National Wildlife Federation, he returns enthusiastically to VNRC as an ex officio board member.   He last served as VNRC’s Acting Director in 1983 – 84 during Seward Weber’s Master’s degree year at the Yale School of Forestry.  His family’s business, Vermont Butter and Cheese Company, celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year.  Allison Hooper, their three teenage sons Miles, Sam and Jay and Don live on their sidehill farm in Brookfield where they cut cordwood and play horseshoes in their off-hours.
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