Plenary Speakers
Read about the confirmed plenary speakers for SETAC Portland.
Amy Cordalis
The Water Remembers: My Family's Fight to Save a River and Way of Life
Amy Bowers Cordalis is a devoted advocate for Indigenous rights and environmental restoration. A member of the Yurok Tribe and ceremony family from the village of Rek-woi at the mouth of the Klamath River, she is a fisherwoman, attorney and mother deeply rooted in the traditions of her people. As Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, Amy leads efforts to support tribes in protecting their sovereignty, lands and waters, including the historic Klamath Dam Removal project—one of the world’s largest river restoration and dam removal initiatives. Former general counsel for the Yurok Tribe and an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, Amy has earned honors as a UN Champion of the Earth and Time 100 climate leader and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Water Remembers, anticipated in October 2025.
Paul Francis Hessburg
How We Lost Landscape Resilience to Wildfires and How We Can Get It Back
In this presentation, Paul will take us back several centuries and show us how landscape resilience to wildfires was actively managed by our Indigenous Peoples. He will show us how resilience was structured across western North American landscapes and varied forest types, and how it functioned to keep people who were living at the time, healthy, safe and secure. He will reveal the changes wrought by Euro-American colonization and modern forest management, and how these changes eroded a durable landscape resilience. Paul will discuss the modern effects of climate change on wildfires and close with a discussion of the work that foresters, homeowners and communities can do to live safely once again, and to reduce wildfire and smoke impacts on human health and those that are most affected by modern wildfires.
Paul is a Senior Research Ecologist (USDA) and Professor (Affiliated or Courtesy Faculty) at UW, OSU, WSU, UBC. He is the 2022-2026 President of the International Association for Fire Ecology (AFE) and a Distinguished Scientist of the USDA, International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America (IALE), and AFE. His research explores wildfire and climate change effects on landscape and wildfire dynamics, and the structure and organization of historical, current, and future landscape resilience. Paul is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in wildfire science and the landscape ecology of forests and their wildfires. You can follow his research here. To make the results of his research and those of his partner labs available to ordinary people, Paul partnered with North 40 Productions to create a Ted Talk, and three documentary films including, Living with Wildfire, The Era of Megafires, and the CNN Special Report: Violent Earth: Wildfires.