Ariel Clark, JD To Speak At 12th World Wilderness Congress In August

The organizers and hosts of the 12th World Wilderness Congress are excited to announce that Ariel Clark, JD will speak at the Congress!

Ariel Clark, JD (she/they) is attorney and advocate providing non-profit organizational and legal regulatory support. She is Odawa Anishinaabe, from Nwejong (Where The Rivers Meet) in what is also known as Michigan. She is an enrolled Tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. She recently partnered with Life Comes From It, a Black, Brown and Indigenous stewarded non-profit organization to support human beings’ (re)union with land and our more-than-human relatives. Ariel is a member of Roots To Sky Sanctuary, a BIPOC-stewarded, land-based healing and community project, and she is also honored to be in study of Indigenous Peacemaking ways. Ariel has written on Rights of Nature as a vehicle to protect sacred plants and traditional cultural knowledge, and she regularly lectures at universities and law schools, including Columbia, Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Berkeley on biopiracy, Nagoya Protocol, and other issues related to ecological justice, drug policy reform, and Indigenous rights. For over a decade, she co-led a women-steered and values-driven law firm, and has a particular passion for exploring ethics in the legal structures and organizational models that honor the Earth, Peoples, and lineages. In 2021, she co-founded a national association of legal professionals dedicated to ethics as the foundation for legal practice in the current plant medicine/psychedelic resurgence. She is currently co-producing a series entitled Law & Ethics: The Psychedelics Industry & Indigenous Peoples, and recently joined the board of Benefit Honoring, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building a global community rooted in Indigenous traditional lifeways and biocultural preservation. Ariel has a Bachelors of Arts from University of Michigan in Religious Studies (2000) and a JD from Berkeley Law School (2005). While in law school, Ariel participated with a group of other Native American law students in discussions at the United Nation for what became the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. She loved the years she spent as a law student and young lawyer working at California Indian Legal Services in the Eureka, Santa Rosa, and Oakland communities. These days, she spends her time listening, talking and singing to the trees, and hanging out with the Aunties and other relatives on her ancestral land.

The 12th World Wilderness Congress (WILD12) is a global forum to coordinate and mobilize the protection of Earth’s remaining wilderness and wild places. It convenes thousands of delegates from around the world approximately every 4 years to seek and agree upon new actions and principles in the stewardship of Earth. WILD12 is hosted by the Oceti Sakowin on behalf of the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, and will place a special emphasis on reinterpreting wilderness through Indigenous perspectives.

To register for WILD12, please visit the link below.