Janet Elizabeth MacGillivray

Janet MacGillivray Wallace graduated from Columbia University and New York University with a Masters in environmental law. She has more than a decade of public interest and social change activism fighting environmental injustices and a track record of successful campaigns. Currently she is Co-Director of the IMatter Campaign where she is leading youth advocacy and mobilization on climate change, a staff attorney at Women’s Earth Alliance focusing on the impacts of geoextraction and false climate solutions’ impact to indigenous communities, and an active blogger on global environmental, human rights, and indigenous issues. At the Natural Resources Defense Council she focused on water, and as Senior Attorney for Riverkeeper, the N.Y.-based environmental litigation group, she worked for the cleanup of the PCB-contaminated Hudson River and fought corporations including GE and Monsanto. At Environmental Defense Fund she fought deregulation of genetically modified foods in the Biotechnology Program and helped bring a constitutional case on right-to-know and protective thresholds for commercial labeling. To better understand the human health impacts on vulnerable populations, she served as Policy Director of the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment and as Executive Director of Blacksmith Institute she traveled internationally to clean up polluted communities whose health was impacted. She next worked as a researcher and writer for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. on the book “Crimes Against Nature” and went on to found and serve as executive director for two nonprofits, Urbangreen, that addressed urban environmental issues, and Make A Ripple, a youth based nonprofit. Prior to that, her work in government includes the United States Department of Justice where she helped prosecute the first case under the international ocean dumping statute and supported litigation against Exxon regarding the Exxon Valdez spill. As a Superfund Attorney in Region II of USEPA she worked to enforce cleanups of contaminated communities, with emphasis on stricter standards most protective of human health. Janet is currently a board member of the Wallace Global Fund and is working on two books, one for children, and one about extractive metals mining, that she anticipates completing in 2011. Janet is the proud mother of fourteen year old Madeleine and has newly relocated from New York City to San Francisco where she lives with her husband Randall Wallace, film composer, activist and grandson of Henry A. Wallace, the thirty-third Vice President of the United States and his two children Allaire and Hank.