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Board of Directors

Ben Cosgrove

Ben is a traveling composer-performer whose music explores themes of landscape, place, and environment in North America. Ben has performed in every U.S. state except Delaware and Hawaii, and held artist residencies and fellowships with institutions including the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, Harvard University, Middlebury College, the Partnership for the National Trails System, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. His nonfiction has appeared in Orion, Taproot, Northern Woodlands, Appalachia, Maine Farms, and other publications. He is based around northern New England. You can read more about Ben and his work on his website.

Robert Cowden

President

Bob is a retired partner in the Boston law firm Casner & Edwards, LLP. There, he concentrated his practice on the affairs of nonprofit organizations. This work included tax, general corporate, real estate and regulatory matters for a variety of operating charitable and educational organizations, grant-making foundations and trade associations. Bob and his wife oversee a forested parcel in Strafford, Vermont that is enrolled in Vermont's current use program. He serves as a director of Road Scholar, Blueprint Schools Network, Inc. and Chaffin Scholarship Fund, all located in Boston. Bob is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.

James Curtis

Jim is President of Cooperstown Environmental LLC, an environmental consulting firm in Andover, Massachusetts. A Registered Professional Engineer in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts as well as a Licensed Site Professional (LSP) in Massachusetts, he has worked in the environmental field for more than 30 years. He is the acknowledged authority on the Massachusetts Brownfields Tax Credit, a state program to encourage the redevelopment of contaminated sites into productive reuse. Jim is also the owner of several solar photovoltaic systems that collectively produce over 1,000,000 kwH annually.

Jim is also the founder and CFO of Curtis Woodlands LLC, which owns about 500 acres of woodlands managed for long-term timber production. He was trained as a New York Master Forest Owner in 1995 and is a lifelong fisherman, deer hunter, and ginseng hunter.

A graduate of Princeton University (BSE – Civil Engineering) and Northeastern University (MS – Civil Engineering), he is the author or co-author of three books and numerous technical articles. He is active in professional associations, a Board member of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, and a long-time supporter of the Institute for Justice. He lives in Andover with his wife Susan and has two grown children.

Tony D’Amato

Tony D’Amato is a Professor of Silviculture and Applied Forest Ecology and Director of the Forestry Program at the University of Vermont.  His research focuses on long-term forest dynamics, disturbance effects on ecosystem structure and function, and silvicultural strategies for conferring adaptation potential within the context of global change, including introduced insects and diseases. Beyond his research and teaching activities, Tony is actively engaged in the forest management community in the northeastern US, including serving as the Chair of the Green Mountain Division of the Society of American Foresters (SAF), Forest Science Technology Coordinator for New England SAF, and co-director of the Northeast Silviculture Institute for Foresters. Prior to joining the University of Vermont in 2015, he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Minnesota and Bullard Fellow at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest. Tony lives in Williston, VT with his wife, Jess, and son, Quinn, where they enjoy spending time together in the woods, as well as at baseball fields and hockey rinks.

Celia Evans

Celia Evans is a Professor of Ecology at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondack Park of New York State. She is an ecologist, educator, singer/songwriter who uses “place” to contextualize her science teaching and songwriting.  

Celia’s ecological research has included beech bark disease impacts on forest structure, snowshoe hare browse behavior: the role of plant chemical defenses and habitat, the response of invasive and native aquatic plants to water temperature in a changing climate, and the factors that structure peatland plant communities. Following a dissertation in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Dartmouth College she did post-doctorate in Science Education at the University of New Hampshire. Since then, she has stayed active in science education in her own classes and by working with K-12 teachers to allow them to develop standards-based inquiry and place-based curricula in a variety of workshop formats. She spent three months in 2012 on a teaching/research Fulbright scholarship in the Altai Republic in the Russian Federation.  There she worked with students at Gorno-Altaisk State University and conducted research with a Russian colleague on rural elementary school students’ cultural relationship to place by examining the relative strengths of formal (school) and informal (family, community, and media) factors that influence their attachment to place and ecological literacy in the Altai and in the Adirondacks. Lately, along with teaching and research she has been dabbling with journalistic style writing in magazines and local newspapers about her science and education research interests and passions.  

Celia has released five original albums. Much of the music gets its inspiration from the environment, landscapes, and people of cold rocky northern places.  Recently she was involved in a recording project and PBS documentary entitled ‘Songs to Keep’ Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector.  The music project was funded by a grant to TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York) and the video chronicles the life of Champlain Valley historian Marjorie Lansing Porter who collected Adirondack folk songs  in the 1940s and 1950s. Several Adirondack-based musicians were asked to choose a song from the original recorded collection. On the album and in the video, Evans sings the lumber camp song ‘Cutting Down the Pines.’ The video project was directed by Paul Larson and won an Emmy Award for the production.

Eva Greger

Ms. Greger has a long history in the Timber Investment industry. Most recently, she served as the head of the Forestry and Farmland business of The Rohatyn Group, subsequent to its acquisition of the Renewable Resources business from GMO. Previously she was the Managing Director of GMO Renewable Resources, which she founded in 1997. At GMO RR, she assembled a widely skilled team of foresters, agriculture experts, and other professionals to complete the investment of more than US$3.2 billion of capital in a variety of direct forest and farm investments in key production regions of the world, including North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. The diversified portfolio of land and crop investments at GMO RR was built to generate real returns for its clients through production of renewable commodities using sustainable land management. She has been in the timberland investment business since 1985, and prior to founding GMO RR, was responsible for evaluating and structuring acquisitions in the U.S., New Zealand, and Chile for Resource Investments, Inc. – an early pioneer in forestry investment for pension fund clients. Ms. Greger earned her B.A. in Economics from Harvard University.

Mike Jurnak

Mike is a Principal at BerryDunn, the largest certified public accounting and management consulting firm in Northern New England with over 300 employees, where he leads the commercial practice group firm-wide as well as manages the firm’s Manchester office. Mike focuses on serving closely-held and family-owned commercial clients, including manufacturing, hospitality and technology businesses. He provides financial reporting, merger and acquisition structuring, internal controls and systems development, and strategic planning services for clients throughout New England.

Mike also works with clients who utilize natural resources such as timber and renewable resources in pursuit of their business objectives. As co-chair of New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility, he sees firsthand how businesses can make positive change adopting sustainable business practices.   

A former volunteer fire-fighter, Mike is also an avid outdoor enthusiast who pursues activities such as hiking, kayaking, biking, and fishing the countless streams and lakes of New England.  He also continues to make an annual trip to deer camp though it’s more for the social aspects.  Mike lives in Bedford, New Hampshire with his wife Colette and has a son attending high school and a daughter in college.

Kateri Kosek

Kateri Kosek is a poet and essayist whose writing explores the intersection of the personal with landscape, place, and the natural world. She is the author of American Eclipse, winner of the 2022 Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Book Award, as well as a chapbook, Vernal. Her writing has appeared in such places as Orion, Terrain, Catamaran, Rosebud, and Southern Poetry Review, and has won prizes at Creative Nonfiction and Briar Cliff Review. Kateri teaches English and writing at Northwestern Connecticut Community College and Western CT State University, where she received an MFA. She has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas, and she lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where she freelances for Berkshire Magazine and The Berkshire Edge. As a lifelong birder, Kateri has occasionally worked surveying local bird populations in the Taconic Mountains, and in Aton Forest in northwest Connecticut, and she enjoys volunteering to climb New England peaks for Mountain Birdwatch, a program of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies that monitors mountain songbird populations. You can read her work here.

Chris Kueffner

Chris is a life-long resident of Connecticut who grew up in that time when parents shooed kids out of the house...and the woods and hills were inviting. As an adult, the allure of trees and topography continue to pull him back in regularly. Now retired, Chris taught in the West Hartford Public School system for many years where he was an elementary level enrichment and accelerated math teacher, working with students in grades 3, 4, and 5. While their own two children have fledged, Chris and his wife live in Storrs where they have both been active community volunteers for many years. In addition to managing their own forestland, they started the Adventure Park at Storrs, as a way of getting people into the forest – and outside in general. When staying relatively still, Chris can be found woodworking, reading, and in conversation.  When moving, he particularly enjoys bicycling and sailing--as well as spending time walking and cross country skiing in the woods.

Jessica Leahy

Jessica Leahy is a professor in the School of Forest Resources at the University of Maine, where she is the Master of Forestry coordinator. She runs a successful research program that studies environmental attitudes and behaviors towards forests, forestry, and other natural resource management topics using a social psychology and communication approaches. Dr. Leahy is past board president of Maine Woodland Owners, a statewide non-profit that engages in advocacy, education, and conservation for small woodland owners. She and her husband, both licensed foresters, were recognized as the 2020 Maine Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year for their stewardship of Wicopy Woods Tree Farm, which is the only small woodland Forest Stewards Guild Model Forest in Maine.

Matt Sampson

Matt has over 30 years of forest management experience across a broad range of ownerships and forest regions. In his current role as Vice President of Forest Management with Eastwood Forests, he is responsible for forest management oversight of forest assets, from acquisition through disposition. Prior to joining Eastwood Forests, he held the position of Vice President of Forest Operations at TFG from 2000 to 2022, with management oversight responsibilities for 1.8 million acres.  Prior to his employment with TFG, Matt worked as a Forest Management Analyst and Landowner Assistance Forester for Westvaco Corporation in Virginia, where he directed forest management activities for non-industrial private landowners. Mr. Sampson holds a B.S. degree in Industrial Forest Operations and an MBA from Virginia Tech.  He is a member of the Pennsylvania Forestry Association, Association of Consulting Foresters, Virginia Forestry Association, Forest Stewards Guild and the Society of American Foresters.

John H. Sanders, Jr. MD.

John was born in inner-city Detroit, grew up on the west side of Cleveland, and is Dartmouth Class of 1964.  He attended University of Michigan Medical School, where he and his wife, Karen, met. He completed his Surgical and Cardiothoracic Surgical training at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, and practiced at Northwestern University Medical School and Dartmouth-Hitchcock for over 40 years. He teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and volunteers at the Good Neighbor Health Clinic in White River Junction, VT.  He  served the past 2 years as president of OSHER at Dartmouth Lifelong Learning Institute. He and Karen share a love of everything outdoors, and manage 60 acres of forest and meadowland in Lyme.