Seminars at Steamboat KUNC

Craig Fugate is the former administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), during which time he organized recovery efforts for a record eighty-seven disasters in 2011 alone.  Before that, as director of the Florida Emergency Management Division, he coordinated the state’s response to Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne (the “Big 4 of ’04”), and Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma in 2005.
At FEMA, Fugate emphasized a “whole community” approach to emergency management; spearheaded the effort to build capacity to stabilize catastrophic events within 72 hours; incorporated “Thunderbolt exercises” using fake disasters and lightning inspections to train emergency operations centers and helped develop smart phone apps for citizens to use to report problems to FEMA.
On a somewhat lighter side, he is also known for the unofficial “Waffle House Index” that FEMA still uses to help determine how much attention a specific disaster area requires.  He explains: “The Waffle House has a very simple operation philosophy: get open.”  So if the local Waffle House is up and running in the wake of a disaster, that’s probably not the most hard-hit area.  If it’s open but with a limited menu, power outages have probably knocked out freezers.  If it’s still closed, the situation there is really bad and needs immediate attention.
Fugate’s interest in combatting disasters goes back a very long way.  He trained as a volunteer firefighter while still in high school, attended fire college and paramedic school at Santa Fe College, and gradually rose through the ranks of Florida fire and rescue organizations until tapped by Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush in 2001 to become director of the Florida Emergency Management Division.  He was then appointed FEMA Administrator by President Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress, and served in that post throughout the Obama administration.
After leaving FEMA, Fugate founded Craig Fugate Consulting LLC.  He also founded disastersrus.org, a website with disaster planning advice and resources, and is a licensed amateur radio operator.  In November 2020, he was a volunteer member of the Biden presidential transition team for the Department of Homeland Security.

Heather Tanana is highly trained in environmental law and public health, and as a member of the Navajo Nation is dedicated to promoting indigenous rights. She has been asked to contribute to the water chapter for the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), which will analyze the effects of global change on the world’s natural environment, resources and social systems. The assessment, due in 2023, will be submitted to the President and Congress.
She is a visiting Professor at the University of California – Irvine School of Law and has become a nationally recognized researcher and educator specializing in the vexing questions at the junction of law, health and water policies. In 2021 she received an award from the American Bar Association for “distinguished achievement in environmental law and policy” for her work including the 2021 report Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin, for which she served as lead author.
She is also an associate faculty member focusing on health policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law with a Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law, and a Master’s of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health with a Certificate in American Indian Health.
Introductory remarks will be provided by Luke Runyon, KUNC Managing Editor and Reporter on the Colorado River Basin.
Also featured during this Seminar is “Dividing the Waters: How the Colorado River Compact Transformed the Southwestern Frontier”: https://youtu.be/CDHUbyDqgOk
Researched, written and produced by Steamboat Springs High School Senior Wren Capra, this ten-minute film features experts on the Compact, a legislative frontier, that recently crossed its centennial and continues to create controversy today.
Winner of numerous state & national awards including National Park Service Outstanding Entry; National Honorable Mention–June 2023 at National History Day (NHD) National Competition at the University of Maryland, College Park campus; Best Senior Project on Western History from Brigham Young University Charles Redd Center for the Humanities–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Colorado State for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Mountain Region for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 in Summit County, CO

Matthew Rojansky is one of the country’s pre-eminent Russia scholars.  In early 2022 he became President and CEO of the U.S.-Russia Foundation, a private grant-making foundation established to promote the development of the private sector and the rule of law in Russia.  Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he has leveraged his deep knowledge base, extensive personal contacts and the foundation’s funding into far-reaching expertise and involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict “writ large” – its effects not only on Russia and Ukraine but also on NATO, the European Union and beyond.
Prior to joining USRF, Rojansky served as Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, the premier U.S. institution for research on Russia, from 2013 to 2021.  Between 2010 and 2013, he was Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he founded Carnegie’s Ukraine Program.  From 2007 to 2010, he served as executive director of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA).
Additionally Rojansky remains a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center and his Wilson Center biography notes that he is “as much a regular at Congressional briefings and on prime-time news shows as he is on the streets of Moscow, Kyiv, or Berlin.”  He is also U.S. Executive Secretary for the Dartmouth Conference, a track-two U.S.-Russia conflict resolution organization begun in 1960, and member of the OSCE Cooperative Security Initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Security Leaders Group. 
Rojansky is regularly interviewed on TV and radio, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Wendy Weiser directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan think tank and public interest law center that works to revitalize, reform, and defend systems of democracy and justice.  Her program focuses on voting rights and elections, money in politics and ethics, redistricting and representation, government dysfunction, rule of law, and fair courts.  She founded and directed the program’s Voting Rights and Elections Project, directing litigation, research, and advocacy efforts to enhance political participation and prevent voter disenfranchisement across the country.
She has appeared frequently in national print and broadcast media, authored numerous articles on voting rights and election reform, litigated ground-breaking voting rights lawsuits, testified before both houses of Congress, and provided policy guidance to federal and state legislators and administrators across the country.
In addition to her publications and articles, she is a frequent public speaker and media commentator and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, PBS, ABC, and CBS.  She is often quoted in print media as well, and is an adjunct professor at the NYU Law School.
Before joining the Brennan Center, Weiser was a senior attorney at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund; a litigation associate at the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and a law clerk in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She received her BA from Yale College and her JD from Yale Law School.

Jamie Metzl“R/Evolution: Recasting Life in an Age of Radical Biotechnology”
Technology Futurist, Geopolitics Expert, Entrepreneur, Sci-Fi Novelist
Jamie Metzl is one of the world’s leading technology and healthcare futurists and author of the non-fiction bestseller, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. He has appeared regularly on national and international media programs and his writings in science, technology, and global affairs are featured in publications around the world. He additionally earned the title of “the original COVID-19 whistleblower” for his leading role advocating for a full investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. During his career, Jamie has served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia and was a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing from 2019 to 2021.

American notions of liberty, property, and the role of government have shaped where we live, who succeeds, and what we must to do to achieve a new ‘American Dream’. Part of that dream for many families is a home of their own.