Executive
Beck Mordini
Executive Director
Beck brings 20 years of nonprofit experience including protecting the biodiversity of native plants at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and protecting undocumented workers from exploitation in Washington state. Her studies of International Environmental Law in Nairobi, Kenya were her first exposure to the issues of desertification and the challenges to global action. While practicing law in Colorado, she and friends founded Climbing for Life, a technical rock-climbing program for at-risk youth. Her career shifted to nonprofit management as a grant writer, development director, marketing and communications manager, community liaison, and executive director. Beck has been a Pachamama Project Drawdown workshop leader, worked on the County Community Climate Action Plan, and testified on behalf of solar reforms to the Board of Supervisors. She has degrees from the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary with coursework in Sustainable Agriculture and Sustainable business from local colleges.
Programs
Miyawaki
Alexandra Ionescu
Assoc. Director of Regenerative Projects
Alexandra Ionescu is a Certified Biomimicry Professional, Ecological Artist and 2024 SUGi Fellow. Her aim is to inspire learning from and about diverse non-human intelligences, cultivating propensities for ecosystem regeneration through co-existence, collaboration and by making the invisible visible. She hopes to motivate others to ask “How can humans give back to the web of life?” by raising awareness of biodiversity and natural cycles to challenge human-centric infrastructures. At present, Alexandra is immersed in expanding her knowledge of ecological restoration through Miyawaki forests, beaver-engineered landscapes, and constructed floating wetlands. In her spare time, Alexandra is part of the Below and Above Collective, an interdisciplinary group that combines art with ecological functionality to build constructed floating wetlands. As the 2024 Creature Conserve Curatorial Fellow, she activated local conversations and art-making about beavers’ overlooked role in healing our ecosystems through a webinar with diverse knowledge holders and a “Read/Reflect/Create” club. Alexandra holds a MA in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies from the Rhode Island School of Design and an online MS in Biomimicry from Arizona State University, graduating from the 5th cohort of the Biomimicry Professional Program (Pro) in 2021. She is a first-generation student from Bucharest, Romania.
Maya Dutta
Miyawaki Advisor
Maya Dutta is a SUGI forest maker who lead the Bio4Climate team that brought the first Miyawaki forest to the North Eastern United States. From 2021 to 2024, she planted six Miyawaki forests in the New England area in parks, schools, parking lots, and housing developments. Her work at Bio4Climate also included project management, partnerships, research, outreach, and education and advocacy. Maya is currently enrolled in graduate studies at Yale, but continues to serve as an important resource to our growing Miyawaki program.
Hannah Lewis
Miyawaki Consultant
Since 2017 Hannah has collected, organized and written most of our Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming. She holds an MS in Sustainable Agriculture and Sociology from Iowa State University and a BA in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College, and worked to create and support community-based food systems for many years. She loves to write and in 2020 published an article on Miyawaki Forests in The Guardian. That has inspired a number of communities to plant mini-forests of their own, and launched Hannah on the writing of her book Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World, published by Chelsea Green Press in June 2022.
Education
Jed Katch
Director
Jed holds a Ph. D. in Developmental and Educational Psychology from the University of Chicago and an M. Ed. in Special Education from Boston University. He has taught in grades K-12, college, and graduate school programs. Jed specializes in connecting student interests with real world activities. At Bio4Climate, he is working to create opportunities for young environmental activists to combine their interests in eco-restoration with gaining academic credit in schools and in higher education.
Community Outreach
Louise Mitchell
Outreach Programs Manager
Louise has advocated for environmental health throughout her career as the sustainable food systems specialist with Climate Health Solutions, as a physical therapist in Baltimore, MD and by promoting conferences for non-profits on nutrition, integrative medicine, and sustainable agriculture. Louise was the sustainable foods program manager at Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment within the University of Maryland Schools of Nursing and Medicine and a regional organizer for the Healthy Food in Health Care program with Health Care Without Harm. She worked with hospitals on increasing their local sustainable food purchases and launching farmers markets, CSAs, gardens and sustainable operations. Louise helped start a farm in 2002 focused on growing mineral-rich food and distributed the food from New York to D.C. Louise is from Toronto, Canada and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame of Maryland University.
Voices of Water
Zuzka Mulkerin
Director
Zuzka brings her perspective from having lived behind the iron curtain in Slovakia and currently lives in New Jersey. Born in Czecho-Slovakia, she was a nature activist and a program coordinator for a local organization, Tree of Life, and a Global Catholic Youth Movement since her college days. Zuzka’s former background as a Finance Operations manager at Pepsi Slovakia, Financial Planning Manager in Kraft Jacobs Suchard Figaro, and auditor at PWC allows her to make connections between economics and ecology with the places we live. In New Jersey, she works as an educator and volunteers her time to care for our common home as a Laudato Sí animator in her community. Her collaboration with the People and Water NGO, the Water Holistic group, and its founder Michal Kravčík since 2020 led her to Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, where she had the privilege to work with Jan Lambert, a friend and the co-founder of Voices of Water. She hopes to continue being a voice for ecosystem-based water renewal, supporting a sustainable community-based new water paradigm.
Science
Jim Laurie
Restoration Ecologist
One of the original founders of Bio4Climate, Jim is a biologist from Rice University and is a pioneer in biological remediation of waste water. He was the technical manager of the world’s largest “Living Machine” project to clean raw municipal sewage with no toxic chemicals. For twenty years Jim was a biologist and trainer in the chemical industry in Houston, TX, where his work with living machines resulted in processing effluent cleaner than possible with conventional technology. He began studying with Allan Savory twenty years ago and has spoken widely about Holistic Management and has been instrumental in spreading the message in New England.
Specialists
Fred Jennings
Ecological Economist
Fred is from Ipswich, MA, where he has spent most of his life. He is an ecological economist with a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Stanford, both in economics. Fred is also an avid conservationist and fly fisherman. He enjoys the outdoors, and has written about natural processes and about economic theory. He has 40 years of teaching and research experience, first in academics and then in economic litigation. He also enjoys his seasonal practice as a saltwater fly fishing guide in Ipswich, MA. Fred joined Biodiversity for a Livable Climate in 2016.
Bill Myatt
Development
Bill is the founding owner of Major Gift Solutions, LLC. His firm is thrilled to partner with Biodiversity for a Livable Climate to help promote the power of the natural world to restore biodiversity and stabilize climate. Bill has worked in the nonprofit sector for over twenty years and in direct fundraising for over a decade. He holds a PhD in Theology from Loyola University Chicago and has taught at several Chicago area schools. As a consultant, Bill founded Major Gift Solutions to help nonprofits locate and land major gifts, drawing from his successes to help drive fundraising effectiveness in the nonprofit sector.
Brendan Kelly
Communications
Brendan began his career teaching conservation education programs at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium before relocating to Washington, DC. Since then, he has spent a decade as a journalist and policy communications strategist, designing and driving narratives for an array of political, advocacy, and institutional campaigns, including in the renewable energy and sustainable architecture spaces. Most recently before joining Bio4Climate, Brendan was working in tech, helping early and growth stage startups tell their stories and develop industry thought leadership. He is interested in how the intersection of informal education, mass communications and marketing can be retooled to drive relatable, accessible climate action. While he loves all ecosystems equally, he is admittedly partial to those in the alpine.
John Minkle
IT
John’s first professional piece of software was call Tree Saver. Having worked in an IT role where it was necessary to print and review daily reports, he was compelled to write code, mostly to save all the wasted paper! True story! He still writes code, and the climate activist has steadily grown. When not full stack web developing and doing other IT work, he is learning about digital marketing algorithms and AI. A lifelong interest in ecosystems and gardening has developed to a professional level, with the goal of healing the earth wherever possible.
Volunteers and Interns
Linsey de Jager
Ecological Research Intern
Linsey is from Stellenbosch, South Africa, and graduated with a degree in Nature Conservation from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. She has been involved with the Cape Winelands Biosphere Reserve (CWBR) since 2014, working on food security, gardens, water conservation, and environmental education. This included helping to write the UNESCO 10 year Biosphere Reserve review for the CWBR in 2017. She has always had a love and passion for the environment as well as deep concern for the negative impacts we humans have on our planet, and tries to do what she can to help the environment and encourage others to do the same. Linsey believes that knowledge is power, and that environmental education is crucial to facing our shared challenges – however, most of the information isn’t aimed at the layman. So she recently joined the Bio4Climate team to share research and write papers that anyone would be able to understand.