"New Energy for America: From ‘Liberal Arts at Work’ to Moving Beyond Coal"
7:30 pm, Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Towsley Lecture Hall/Norris 101
James Gignac currently serves as Midwest director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. Based in
Chicago, Gignac helps coordinate and manage the campaign’s legal, organizing, and communications
activities across a fourteen-state region. His principal focus is on supporting the campaign’s
goal to eliminate one-third of the nation’s global warming emissions that come from the use of coal
to generate energy by opposing new coal plant proposals, accelerating the retirement of existing
coal-fired power plants, and driving investment away from coal and into clean energy solutions like
energy efficiency, solar power, and wind power. Gignac’s day-to-day work consists of a varied and
interesting mix of strategic planning, legal coordination, messaging, organizing, and policy advocacy
designed to help move America beyond coal and into the clean energy economy of the future.
After graduating from Albion with majors in history and political science, Gignac earned his law
degree from Harvard Law School in 2004. While in law school, Gignac served as executive director of
the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, was elected president of the Harvard Environmental Law Society, and
received a Dean’s Award for Community Leadership. After leaving Harvard, he spent a year serving as
a judicial law clerk for the Alaska Supreme Court. Gignac then returned to the Midwest and worked as
an associate in the environmental practice group with the law firm of Mayer Brown LLP in Chicago. He
joined the Sierra Club in his current capacity in June 2008.
This will be Gignac’s second presentation at an Elkin R. Isaac Symposium. As an Albion College
senior in spring 2001, he presented his thesis entitled “Citizen Environmental Activism: Three Case
Studies in the Albion, Michigan Area.” The thesis consisted of an analysis of three different
opportunities Gignac had during his time at Albion to work with and study citizen involvement in
environmental issues as a member of the Environmental Institute’s interdisciplinary Rice Creek
Project and Professor Wesley Dick’s Environmental History course. Gignac received a Jenkins Award
for his thesis work and was also named the outstanding graduate in both American history and
political science in 2001. In his current role with the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and
largest grassroots environmental organization, Gignac continues to work with and for volunteer
activists seeking to protect their local environment and address the critical
challenge of climate change.
The Institute for the Study of the Environment is a co-sponsor of this lecture.
