2026 Wyss Scholar Brooke Helstrom ’27: Advocating for Wildlife and Ecosystem Protection

Brooke grew up hiking in the Appalachian mountains and building fairy houses out of acorns and twigs in her New Jersey backyard. Her curiosity for the natural world brought a desire to understand animals and the ecosystems they inhabit. At the University of Southern California, Brooke led camping trips and studied conservation through the University of Botswana. These experiences led her to Montana, where she worked for NRDC on human-wildlife conflict. Before law school, Brooke was the litigation assistant for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office in Bozeman. Prior to that, she was Stewardship Manager for the Gallatin Watershed Council, where she led local conservation efforts such as building beaver dam analogs and planting lots of willows. Seeing the impact of these efforts on wildlife and land solidified her pursuit of environmental law.

Last summer, Brooke was a Summer Associate at Crag Law Center in Portland. On campus, Brooke is co-director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund student chapter, a board member and project coordinator for the Northwest Environmental Defense Center, and an extern for Advocates for the West. This summer, she’ll be returning to Earthjustice’s office in Bozeman as a law clerk. She is excited to draw from both the natural and legal worlds and advocate for a legal system with a long-term vision for all species.

About the Wyss Scholars Program

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. Lewis & Clark is one of only a few law schools in the country selected for this program.

Two Wyss Scholars are selected from Lewis & Clark Law School each year on the basis of their leadership potential and academic strength and their commitment to furthering land conservation.