Russell Long

Russell Long After losing his Mom to lung cancer in 1988, Russell initiated and led the successful campaign in San Francisco to ban smoking in restaurants and workplaces, the beginning of a career in environmental and public health activism. In 1996, he founded and become executive director of the national environmental group Bluewater Network. During that time, he was responsible for numerous state and federal laws and regulations including the United States’ first-ever law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, new fuel economy labeling for new cars (CAFE labels), regulations to reduce pollution from new container ships, oil tankers, and cruise ships, a ban on the toxic gas additive MTBE, an end to the sale of polluting two-stroke marine engines and labeling for new engines, regulations reducing the use of flame retardant chemicals in furniture and infant products, and restrictions on the use of snowmobiles, jet-skis, and all-terrain vehicles in the nation's National Parks. He has written opinion pieces on environmental issues for major media outlets such as the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe, and has executive-produced films on sea-level rise and other environmental threats (Someplace With a Mountain, The Island President, Chloe and Theo, A Sheltered Sea). Early in his career, he was an America’s Cup Skipper and held the world-record for breaking the 50 mph barrier in a sailboat. ​He received his BA from Harvard, MBA from Columbia, and Ph.D. in Deep Ecology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He continues to serve as a Strategic Advisor to Friends of the Earth, U.S., on whose Board he served from 2006 to 2015. In 2001, he was appointed by California State Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg to serve on the California Oil Spill Technical Advisory Committee where he served from 2001 to 2006.