strategic planning. He has worked extensively with both environmental and health
care organizations.EDWARD
E. CLARK, JR.
Biography
For
more than twenty years, Ed Clark has been a national leader in the field
of conservation. His involvement has ranged from wilderness designation
and public land management to pesticide regulation and endangered
species protection.
Raised
in Flint Hill, Virginia, Ed received a BA in Political Science from Bridgewater
College. He did graduate work in
education at JMU and UVA. He has
also done extensive professional training in the fields of environmental mediation,
organization management, and
strategic planning. He has worked extensively with both environmental and health
care organizations.
From
1973-78, he taught at the VA School for the Deaf. While still a teacher,
he became president of the VA Wilderness Committee and led the
grassroots effort to protect more than fifty thousand acres in
Virginia’s two national forests. In 1979, he became the first
Executive Director of the Conservation Council of Virginia Foundation,
in Richmond. In 1980, he co-founded and became Assistant Director of the
Environmental Task Force in Washington, DC.
In
1982, he returned to the Shenandoah Valley. From his home in Waynesboro,
Ed provided management training, political consulting, and environmental
mediation services for such national conservation groups as Trout
Unlimited and the Appalachian Trail Conference.
In
1982, Ed co-founded The Wildlife Center of Virginia.
Under his leadership, The Wildlife Center has become the leading
teaching hospital for native wildlife medicine in North America, if not
the world. Among its many
honors, The Wildlife Center received the 1993 National Environmental
Achievement Award for Wildlife Conservation - one of the nation’s
highest awards. The Wildlife Center has become a prototype for wildlife
hospitals worldwide.
Active
in public service, Ed served four years on the VA Council on the
Environment, the state environmental policy board, and four years as a
trustee of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, one of the nation’s
largest land trusts. Since
1992, he has hosted Virginia Outdoors, an outdoor recreation
series on Virginia Public Television. He is currently the narrator and
host of Wildlife Emergency, a weekly series on the
Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet network.
He also serves on many non-profit boards and councils, including
those of the National Wildlife Federation (of which he is Vice
Chairman), National Wildlife Productions, International Wildlife
Rehabilitation Council, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the
Greater Augusta Chamber of Commerce.
He
has received many local, state and national honors for his work. In
1987, the Va. Wildlife Federation named Ed Conservation Educator of the
Year. In 1992 the U.S.
Committee for the U.N. Environment Program named him one of the “500
Environmental Achievers.” He received the 1993 Conservation
Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1997, he
received the highly prestigious “Chuck Yeager Award” from the
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for his conservation work “on
the ground.”
Ed
is in great demand as a motivational speaker, organizational consultant,
and trainer. His work takes him across the United States, and often to
foreign countries. When he
is not on the road (and often when he is) Ed enjoys his passion for
scuba diving. He holds a
Master Scuba Diver certification and is an avid underwater photographer.
Ed lives with his 2 Labrador Retrievers, 3 cats, 2 birds and pygmy goats
“in the woods” near Waynesboro, Virginia.
Specific Latin American Experience – Ed has traveled to Latin America seven times since 1997, working with primarily in Central America with wildlife rescue centers and educational institutions. Most of these trips have been to speak at conferences or seminars on wildlife conservation, wildlife medicine, or environmental education, or to provide one-on-one consulting services to individual conservation organizations. He specializes in the human dimensions of wildlife conservation, strategic planning for conservation, environmental mediation and public education. He is casually conversant in Spanish and comfortable in the Latin American culture.