Home

Mark J. Spalding

Current Position

Biography

Mark J. Spalding is an authority on international environmental policy and law. His research interests relate to marine conservation including protected areas, and trade and the environment. Mark's current research projects include the protection of marine mammals and conservation of their habitat on the west coast of North America; reduction of ocean noise pollution; establishment of new marine protected areas in the the Lesser Antilles; and interactions between climate change and oceans. From 1995 to 2000, he coordinated a multinational effort to save Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California Sur, the last pristine birthplace of the Pacific Gray Whale. From 2003 to 2006, he headed up the Alaska Oceans Program, which supported ecosystem-based advocacy efforts to reform fisheries management, increased ocean literacy in Alaska, fostered the creation of a Shipping Safety Partnership, and supported national and international work to promote sustainable seafood choices.

Through the end of the Clinton Administration he was a member of a Presidential and Congressional Advisory Committee on U.S.-Mexico environmental border relations, the Good Neighbor Environmental Board. He is chair emeritus of the National Board of Directors of the Surfrider Foundation and former Chair of the Board of Directors of Pro Peninsula and One Earth One Justice. He is the former Executive Director of the San Diego Foundation's Orca Fund. Mark is the Chair of the Council of the National Whale Conservation Fund.

Mark is the former Director of the Environmental Law and Civil Society Program, and Editor of the Journal of Environment and Development, at the Graduate School of International Relations & Pacific Studies (IR/PS), University of California at San Diego. In addition to lecturing at IR/PS, Mark has taught at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD's Muir College, UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and University of San Diego's School of Law. Mark, who has been practicing law and acting as a policy consultant for 20 years, was the chair of the environmental law section of the California State Bar Association from 1998-1999. He holds a B.A. in history with Honors from Claremont McKenna College, a J.D. from Loyola Law School, and a Master in Pacific International Affairs (MPIA) from IR/PS.

During 2003 and 2004, Mark was a Sustainability Institute, Donella Meadows Leadership Fellow where he worked on applying systems analysis to federal fisheries management problems, and in 2004 he served as the first SeaWeb Senior Fellow, where his project focused on the viability of a large scale corporate markets campaign for four major seafood species. He was a research fellow at UCSD's Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies in 1998 where he studied Mexican protected areas management.

When he is not in the Lesser Antilles, Mexico or on an airplane, he can be found at his 220-year-old farm in Maryland, which always has something in need of repair, husbandry or stewardship. He believes that good food and good wine shared with good friends is the best way to spend time not working. Mark is an avid reader and loves to travel. He enjoys walking and hiking, and recently delighted in his first experience snow-shoeing. While his Formula 2 racing career was curtailed by an accident in Turn Nine at the Ontario Motor Speedway, Mark still accelerates out of the curves like Juan Manuel Fangio.

“Mark Spalding, the Environmental Movement’s best defense against self-inflicted factual errors and general defender of truth, justice and the American way.”

~Anne Sheridan,
Dewey Square Group