Join us for the Sigurd Olson Lecture Series, inaugurated in 1999, which highlights current natural resource topics presented by national leaders in the conservation community. Speakers describe conservation problems of national or global significance and detail techniques and tools to achieve solutions. We are hitting the road for the lecture series and will be at five different colleges in the upper Midwest in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, Ely, and Ashland, WI. Free and open to the public. Learn more below. 

The 2024 Sigurd Olson Lecture will explain the use of the Antiquities Act as a land preservation tool using the history of national monuments in California. National monuments have a nearly one-hundred-year history in the state and have been essential in the establishment of the statewide network of protected landscapes.

The speakers:

• Nobby Riedy has worked on conservation of public lands for nearly 40 years. He worked for The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. and in California. Afterward, he co founded WildSpaces, a California lands-focused philanthropy to support the conservation of natural landscapes and biodiversity, and the benefits they provide to people. WildSpaces has over 100 grantees in California engaged in statewide, regional, and local campaigns to protect the natural world.
• Matt Keller is the Campaigns Director at the Protection Campaign, a project of Resources Legacy Fund. In this role, he serves as a funder and strategic advisor to grassroots organizations and tribal nations working to protect important landscapes. Prior to this, he spent nearly two decades at The Wilderness Society and The Wilderness Society Action Fund, leading advocacy campaigns to protect public lands across the nation, holding elected officials accountable, and supporting conservation friendly candidates for public office. Matt led the national monument’s campaign during the Obama Administration, which resulted in the permanent protection of nearly 5.5 million acres of public land.

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