Keynote Speakers 2022

Lil Milagro Henriquez, M.A.

Keynote: Growing Resilience in a Climate Challenged Future

Lil Milagro Henriquez, M.A., was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and has family who  survived Hurricane Katrina—one of the nation’s most infamous climate-change-related disasters. She is a 20-year veteran of social and environmental justice activism. In 2014, she won the Jonathan Daniels Memorial Fellowship for Social Justice award. In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to preparing and empowering frontline youth for climate change. In 2020, she received the Women’s Earth Alliance fellowship and the 2021 recipient of the Partners Advancing Climate Equity fellowship. She was recently recognized as one of the top 16 Eco-Warriors of 2021 by Marin Magazine and did a TEDx talk with the City of San Francisco illuminating the failures of conventional education to prepare youth for climate change. In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network. Mycelium has been named as one of the only organizations actively preparing young people for climate change in the United States.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD

Keynote: "Braiding Sweetgrass and TEK"

Robin Wall Kimmerer(opens in new window) is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Photo credit: Dale Kakkak

Tracey Osborne PhD

Keynote: Climate Justice and Higher Education

Tracey Osborne PhD is Associate Professor and Presidential Chair in the Management of Complex Systems Department at UC Merced. She also serves as the Founding Director of the UC Center for Climate Justice. Her research focuses on the social and political economic dimensions of climate change mitigation in tropical forests and the role of Indigenous Peoples, the politics of climate finance (with particular emphasis on carbon markets), global environmental governance, and climate equity and justice. She has worked on these issues globally with extensive field experience in Mexico and the Amazon (Peru, Ecuador and Guyana). View her TedX talk "Moving to Action on Climate Justice."(opens in new window)