ABOUT US

John is the founder of Center for Sustainable Economy and currently serves as both President and Senior Economist. John coordinates consulting work with non-profits, businesses, universities, and government agencies seeking environmental economics expertise and analysis to support their sustainability initiatives and programs. He also helps lead work on CSE’s Forests for Climate Change and Biodiversity, Genuine Progress, and Green Infrastructure Programs. FULL BIO >

Daphne Wysham is a Climate Justice fellow with the Center for Sustainable Economy and serves as CEO of Methane Action. A former Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where she worked for 20 years, Daphne has worked since the mid-1990s on research and advocacy at the intersection of climate justice and sustainable economies. FULL BIO >

Dr. Nejem Raheem serves as an environmental economics fellow at CSE in the Green Infrastructure Program and the New Measures of Progress programs. Most recently, he has worked on CSE projects analyzing the economic impacts of infrastructure development in arctic Alaska. Nejem is an assistant professor of economics at Emerson College in Boston with over 10 years of experience as an environmental economist. FULL BIO >

Evan Branosky is an environmental policy fellow at the Center for Sustainable Economy. With CSE, Evan has coauthored reports on the net public benefits of the proposed U.S. Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2012 to 2017 and the Chuitna Coal Project of Beluga Coal Fields, Alaska. His main focus since 2007 has been on water quality; specifically analyzing and developing market- and performance-based programs seeking to reduce the cost of achieving water quality standards in impaired U.S. waters. Evan holds an M.P.P in environmental policy from the University of Maryland where his final project assessed water needs for hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus shale. His B.S. from Rutgers University is in agricultural science.

Susan Leopold, PhD, is an ethnobotanist and passionate defender of biodiversity. Over the past 20 years, Susan has worked extensively with indigenous peoples in Peru and Costa Rica. She is the Executive Director of United Plant Savers and Director of the Sacred Seeds Project. Prior to working at United Plant Savers, she worked as a librarian at the Oak Spring Garden Library, specializing in digitizing rare herbals and botanical travel manuscripts. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Botanical Dimensions and the Center for Sustainable Economy. She is an advisory board member of American Botanical Council. She is a proud member of the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia and the author of the children's book Isabella's Peppermint Flower, teaching about Virginia's botanical history. She lives on and manages a productive farm, the Indian Pipe Botanical Sanctuary with her three children in Virginia, where she raises goats, peacocks, and herbs. She is an avid recreational tree climber, in love with the canopy just as much as the herbs of the forest floor.

Dr. Kelly O’Hanley is a board member of the Center for Sustainable Economy. An obstetrician gynecologist with a degree in public health, she has worked in almost 40 countries to foster the health of mothers and babies. She has taught the next generation of physicians at Stanford and Harvard Universities. She has had a lifelong interest in environmental protection. She is currently active in Portland, Oregon with Greenpeace Pacific Northwest, and is also affiliated with Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and has provided testimony on their behalf at numerous fossil fuel terminal hearings.

As a former public interest attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he represented various public interest “watchdog” organizations in New Mexico in numerous successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for almost 20 years. His former clients include Citizen Action, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, The Los Alamos Study Group, Forest Guardians, Forest Conservation Council, and Animal Protection of New Mexico. His legal work also included public interest advocacy as a staff counsel and policy advisor for the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. His background and experience also includes media relations, community organizing, and organizing public events, including as a Director of the annual public-interest law conference at the University of Oregon. His current work with CSE and other non-profits focuses on law and policy analysis in support of various environmental causes.

Ella is a research intern at the Center for Sustainable Economy. She is a 2021 graduate of Smith College with a B.A. in Environmental Science & Policy. Her studies focused on political ecologies of the Americas, and outside of class, she organized with Divest Smith College. She grew up in Western Massachusetts on the ancestral homeland of the Mohican people, and she is currently based there. Ella is currently working on research on oil refinery decommissioning with CSE.