MEIC Board of Directors
The Board of Directors has complete legal control of MEIC and overall responsibility for its well-being and success.
MEIC Seeking Board Candidates
This is the time of year when MEIC’s Board of Directors seeks suggestions for prospective Board candidates from you, our members. Any suggested names will be considered for nomination based on the needs the Board has for specific skills and geographic representation at this time.
If you know of a current MEIC member, including yourself, who you believe should be considered for nomination, please send the member’s name, telephone number, address, and e-mail address to meic@meic.org by June 1st, 2013.
Current MEIC Board of Directors
- Roger Sullivan, President (Kalispell)
- Zack Winestine, Vice President (New York)
- Gary Aitken, Secretary (Ovando)
- Anne Johnson, Treasurer (Bozeman)
- Mark Gerlach (Missoula)
- Michelle Tafoya (Whitefish)
- Myla Kelly (Bozeman)
- Paul Edwards (Helena)
- Stephanie Kowals (Seattle)
- Steve Gilbert (Helena)
- Steve Scarff (Bozeman)
- Tom Steenberg (Missoula)
- Kirwin Werner (Ronan)
Roger is an attorney whose law practice has for a number of years included environmental, land use, and public policy issues. He has regularly advocated on behalf of such issues in the courtroom and occasionally at the legislature.
Zack’s family extends back four generations in Helena, MT, and the extraordinary uniqueness of Montana’s wild places were made vivid to him as a child. Zack and his wife have a cabin north of Helena and spend as much time in Montana’s backcountry as they can.
Gary grew up in the soggy Pacific Northwest, falling into rivers and tumbling down snowfields. He spent twenty years in Colorado raising sheep and writing computer software. A Montana resident since 1992, he began telecommuting from a trashed out mobile home with the phone outside under an antifreeze can nailed to a tree stump. Along the way he has spent a lot of time exploring crazy places by various non-motorized means.
Mark has had an association with MEIC since 1975. He lived in the Blackfoot River Valley for 35 years; the first 20 years in the Lincoln Valley at the headwaters, and then 15 years in the Greenough Valley in the middle reaches of the Blackfoot. Twenty-five of the years were spent as a ranch hand and ranch manager, while the other 10 years included working for the U.S. Forest Service; as a logger and horse logger; and as a sawmill owner and operator. He has often called upon MEIC’s resources and expertise to help in current and historic mining issues, in water quality issues, and in the arenas of State and federal politics.
I believe that MEIC is one of the most effective environmental organizations in Montana. I have worked with some of the staff over the years and have found them always to be well-informed and committed to their work.
After growing up in New England, and just hours after graduation from Tufts University in Biology/Environmental Science, Myla and her husband-to-be and left for Montana. Our tiny Ford Escort held all of our possessions with room to spare. We captained antique boats and gave naturalist tours on the lakes of Glacier National Park. With Glacier as our introduction to Montana, we were destined to never leave.
Paul Edwards is a lifelong opponent of exploitative, predatory Corporate Capitalism that has raped and robbed the West from the first white influx to today, and criminally created the current wholesale meltdown of the American economy.
In the summer of 1975 Stephanie came to Montana for the first time. She had never been somewhere where she felt as comfortable as in the Blackfoot Valley. After returning to Seattle and graduating from college, she related the story of her summer in Montana to her grandfather. Much to her surprise, his response was “I’m from there.” Stephanie learned that her family had homesteaded, mostly in the Ovando area, from about 1870 to 1930. Eventually the thousands of acres of ranchland were sold off, leaving just one lot in the town of Ovando.
Steve Gilbert has been a Montana resident since 1967. For 41 of these years he has worked as a biological consultant, 25 of which he was part-owner and president of an environmental consulting company that specialized in wildlife, aquatics/fisheries, soils, vegetation, forestry, range and hydrology. Separate from his business, Steve worked in Alaska on salmon studies, Yellowstone Park on grizzly bears, the Teton Wilderness on an early satellite/radio-telemetry study with elk, did wildlife inventories in the North Cascades and Pasayten Wilderness in Washington, studied Icelandic gulls on Baffin Island, NWT and cliff-nesting raptors in Glacier Park. He is an associate with the Montana Peregrine Institute, and has conducted neo-tropical bird and raptor surveys in the west nearly every year since 1971.
Tom is a first generation Montanan, who moved to Missoula in 1978, drawn by the mountains and opportunities for outdoor recreation. He loves and cherishes the magnificent natural environment we are blessed with in Montana and takes every opportunity to recreate, hunt and fish our rivers, lakes, mountains and prairies.
Kirwin’s passion for environmental causes began in northern Michigan in the 1970’s where he was co-founder of the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition – a group then, as now, contesting expansion of coal-fired power plants, iron-ore mining, and pollution issues related to Lake Superior.
