Thomas Linzey serves as senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. He is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” and “rights of nature” movements which have resulted in the adoption of several hundred laws across the United States and around the world.

Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School, a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award, and a former finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award. He is the author of On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability and other books, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Nation magazine. He has been named one of Forbes’ magazines’ “Top Ten Revolutionaries,” and one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years in American Environmental Leaders. Linzey lives in Spokane, Washington.

Mari Margil is the Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER). She works with civil society; national, state, and local governments; tribal nations; and indigenous communities in the U.S., Ecuador, Australia, the Philippines, Nepal, and elsewhere, to advance Rights of Nature frameworks. She consulted with Ecuador’s Constituent Assembly, helping to draft the world’s first Rights of Nature constitutional provisions.

Margil received her Master’s degree from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is a co-author of The Bottom Line or Public Health (Oxford University Press 2010), Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (Wakefield Press 2011), and Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (Oregon State University Press 2021). Her writing has also been featured in publications including The Guardian, YES! Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, Democracy Journal, World Policy Journal, and Common Dreams.