The Resilient Environments Changemaker

A vice president in the Environmental Impact Assessment and Permitting group at WSP in the U.S., Doug has been a driving force in environmental policy for 32 years.

His journey began as an Environmental Studies major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where a transformative semester backpacking through the southwestern U.S. sparked his passion. Immersed in the isolated and rugged landscapes of Utah and Arizona, Doug engaged with advocacy groups tackling critical issues like Native American water rights and the impact of livestock grazing on public lands. His senior thesis on the latter topic became the cornerstone of his application to WSP more than three decades ago.

Today, Doug continues to build on that foundation, leading efforts to create a more resilient future for communities across California and beyond.

My primary source of motivation are my colleagues. I'm fortunate to work with super smart and passionate people on the programs that I manage, and although we tend to be somewhat geographically dispersed, we're very much united in our focus on delivering technically sound analyses and problem solving for our clients. Looking around at my teams here at WSP and seeing the energy and enthusiasm on display in colleagues a full generation younger than me is motivational. They are the future of the company and the business and it's inspiring to see what really a bright future that is.

There's so much promise, but there's obviously a lot of challenge in the field that you work in. Can you highlight some of the challenges that you're trying to resolve based on the work that you do today?

One good example is work we're doing with the Unified Federal Review Branch, an organization within the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The Branch is tasked with facilitating communication and cooperation between a dozen federal agencies with emergency response and environmental stewardship responsibilities nationwide. We've been working with the Branch for almost four years, and we recently helped them develop an Interagency Reimbursable Work Agreement, which helps fund collaboration between federal organizations and allows multiple agencies to make sure that they can leverage their combined resources. A real-world example is recent cooperation between FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the wake of a hurricane. Both organizations have many great tools and resources that should be applied after such an event, but they have overlapping responsibilities that can lead to duplication of effort, inefficiencies, and extended timelines when time is of the essence. The work agreement that we helped develop lays out a framework for funding that allows those organizations to work together and ultimately get the help to the people that need it most in the quickest way possible.