Leon Kolankiewicz

LEON KOLANKIEWICZ is Scientific Director for NumbersUSA. He is a wildlife biologist and natural resources planner and former environmental planner with the Orange County (California) Environmental Management Agency. Leon has a B.S. in forestry and wildlife management from Virginia Tech and an M.S. in environmental planning from the University of British Columbia. He has worked as an environmental professional for more than three decades in three countries and more than 40 states, including stints with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, University of Washington, University of New Mexico, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer promoting tropical rainforest and wildlife conservation in Honduras. He has managed Environmental Impact Statements (EIS’s) on projects ranging from dams and reservoirs to flood control facilities, roads, parks, power plants, oil/gas drilling, and mines. He assisted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to prepare management plans at 50 national wildlife refuges in many states.  He has written or edited more than 400 articles, blog posts, reports, conservation plans, and EIS’s (under the National Environmental Policy Act). He is the author of Where Salmon Come to Die: An Autumn on Alaska’s Raincoast (Pruett, 1993) and a contributor to Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and the anthology of classic and contemporary environmental writing Environment and Society: A Reader (New York University Press, 2017). He has been the lead author of 16 studies on sprawl and loss of wildlife habitat, open space, and farmland for NumbersUSA in the past 24 years.