February 16, 2022

2022 Wyss Scholars Named

Second year law students Casey Bage and Glenda Valdez are the 2022 Wyss Scholars, joining a new generation of leaders focused on land conservation issues.

Casey Bage ’23 and Glenda Valdez ’23 have been named as the 2022 Wyss Scholars.  Funded by the Wyss Foundation, a private, charitable foundation dedicated to land conservation, the Wyss Scholars Program seeks to identify and support a new generation of leaders focused on land conservation issues.

Casey Bage grew up hiking the oak groves of southern California and camping in the Sierra Nevada range, graduating from Willamette University with a BA in politics and policy as well as an MBA in sustainability. After college, he worked for environmental nonprofits including Environment Oregon, OSPIRG, Environment California, and Columbia Riverkeeper, and in the solar energy industry.

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Bage is a managing editor for Environmental Law Review 2022–23. He sits on the board of the student organization Students Eliminating Environmental Discrimination (SEED) that focuses on environmental justice and equity and has volunteered with the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC) as a project coordinator. He was a law and policy clerk for the Green Energy Institute in summer 2021. His 2022 summer will be devoted to clerking at Earthrise Law Center at Lewis & Clark Law School working on a variety of natural resources and public lands issues.

Glenda Valdez (’23) grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Northern Minnesota and spent much of her time rambling in the woods, cross-country and alpine skiing in the winter, and paddling in Lake Superior during the summer. During college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she spent her time researching in a molecular ecology lab and volunteering in the community through the UW Department of Chemistry Institute for Chemical Education. Ultimately, she earned degrees in Entomology and Applied Economics, as well as certificates in Leadership and Environmental Studies. Through these studies, she became fascinated by how the social and natural sciences can inform environmental law and policy.

Following her college graduation, she was an intern in the director’s office in the Bureau of Land Management and then a Science Education Analyst at the National Science Foundation (NSF). She was able to see how national policy–in the context of public lands and then federal grant programs–is crafted. At NSF she also conducted research to inform equity in funding of STEM education programs and was struck by how many of the communities facing barriers to higher education also face environmental injustice.

Now as a second-year law student at Lewis & Clark, Glenda volunteers with the Northwest Environmental Defense Center as a student board member and on the public lands and environmental justice committees assisting with FOIA requests and creating one-page resource sheets. She spent the summer of 2021 working for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she focused on advocacy to support an equitable transition to clean energy. She will be a summer 2022 law clerk for Earthjustice’s Oceans Program where she will explore litigation-focused work in the context of federal offshore lands and resources.

Glenda’s dedication to public interest work and conservation is rooted in her life experiences. Following graduation, she hopes to work in the public interest field to work on natural resources conservation and climate change issues that matter to local communities and have a national impact. With family in Peru and Finland, Glenda is keenly aware of how the impacts of climate change are being felt on a global scale and is deeply committed to doing her part to mitigate the consequences.

Lewis & Clark Law School was selected in 2017 to be part of the Wyss Scholars Program. Funded by the Wyss Foundation, a private, charitable foundation dedicated to land conservation, the Wyss Scholars Program seeks to identify and support a new generation of leaders focused on land conservation issues. The selected Lewis & Clark Scholars will receive a $5,000 stipend for qualifying work in their 2L summer, a contribution towards tuition during 3L year, and two post- graduate payments if they are working in a qualifying position. Lewis & Clark is one of only a few law schools in the country selected for this program.