Chloe Schneider Johnson

Growing up catching critters and watching the annual slew tadpoles emerge from the vernal pools of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Chloe Schneider Johnson never thought twice about a career outside of environmentalism. At UNC Chapel Hill, she was part of a lab researching carbon evasion in high-altitude wetlands — which granted her the privilege of trekking through the extraordinary Páramo wetlands of the Ecuadorian Andes. After graduating, she worked on drought and forest monitoring projects through three terms at NASA DEVELOP (now EarthRise Developers Academy), using remote sensing data to inform community concerns and guide environmental management on the ground. From there, she joined a small team at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and helped shape a new wildfire workstream focused on restoring forest resilience across the Western U.S. and facilitating global knowledge exchange. 

After nearly five years with EDF she committed to learning more about the ins and outs of policy and is pursuing her Master of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. The decision is rooted in a core conviction: in a system that grants personhood to corporations while offloading the costs of ‘progress’ onto environmental and social sacrifice zones, the environmental crisis often stems from a crisis of misplaced priorities and concentrated power. She believes that every community has an unalienable right to healthy air, clean water, nourishing food, and a thriving surrounding ecosystem. She is interested in helping organize communities, policies, and practices to defend and restore those rights, whether the threat is a consumptive data center, the proliferation of toxic pollutants, or wildfire fueled by centuries of forest exploitation. 

With the western wildfire crisis’s roots in Indigenous exclusion and full fire suppression, Chloe’s wildfire work aims to center the leadership of Indigenous communities and advocates with deeply place-based approaches to stewardship and use of fire as a regenerative tool. At EDF, she worked to place Tribal co-management at the heart of their public landscape restoration strategy, and she is currently honored to be interning with the Karuk Tribal Department of Natural Resources supporting their visionary policies and practices directly. In her free time, she enjoys putting beneficial fire on the ground alongside local Prescribed Burn Associations and Tribal Organizations.

Chloe is passionate about reckoning honestly with the injustices that made today's crises possible, and committed to pushing the environmental movement to avoid perpetuating the harms it seeks to undo. She is inspired by the innate balance of natural systems, and sees humans not as separate from nature but as part of it — called to find our way back into right relationship. Her work aims to help facilitate that return: removing barriers, building sustainable stewardship economies, and cultivating the social and cultural conditions for ecosystems and communities to thrive together.