Who We Are

The team at Environment Counts
Rick
Rick Higgins’ business career spanned some 40 years. This included eight years in government, 12 years in management consulting and 17 years in the GIS and AM/FM software development business. If that doesn’t add up, the missing time was well spent climbing mountains, paddling rivers and traveling with his wife Christine, his two daughters and friends in remote parts of the globe. EC came about when he was interested in becoming informed about the Copenhagen Conference; along with ex business colleagues and friends he felt the conference sponsored information and communications was poor, and that in general it was difficult for busy people to “know who or what to believe” about the environment and related issues.
Geoff

Frank
Frank Schwartz has over 30 years of experience throughout Canada, in the USA, and in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. His career as a management consultant involved strategic planning, facilitation, organizational support and development, and economic and socio-economic analysis for clients in the private, not-for-profit, and public sectors. Frank is an avid bicyclist and pedals about Halifax, Canada and further afield, weather permitting. He loves traveling and observing how cultures deal with and adapt to their challenges. He considers himself a scientific skeptic; wanting to look at all reasonable points of view, but dealing with them through science-based lens. His interest in things environmental were abruptly awakened when, about 20 years ago, he saw a poster in an office in Bangladesh which proclaimed that “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” (Interestingly this proverb is of Native American origin.) Having four children, this idea stuck with him and he brings this keen interest to Environment Counts.
Wendy
Mike
Mike was a founder and Director of EnvironmentCounts.org. Mike died in April, 2014. He made a seminal contribution to the definition and development of our organisation and led our discussions on focus and methods. He was a trenchant critic of any movement away from our focus on primary data. He is and will continue to be remembered and missed by our team. In his academic career Mike focused on environmental management (specifically water resources and coastal zone management) and on the interactions between society and risk in a context of uncertainty and change (notably climate change). His work over the past decade concentrated on issues of food security (in conjunction with the UN-FAO) and on community and stakeholder involvement in poverty alleviation, water supply and health care in Asia/India (China, Tibet, Assam) and Africa (Libya, Tanzania, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe).