User:Crockettstreet/Jessica Hobby Catto

Jessica Hobby Catto, born in Texas, is an environmentalist, conservationist, writer, and political columnist. Ms. Catto has served on the Chairman’s Council of Conservation International, the boards of the National Parks Conservation Association, World Resources Institute, the Conservation Fund and is a former Vice Chair of Environmental Defense. Under the auspices of the American Land Trust Association and the Conservation Fund, she established the American Land Conservation award, given annually to a citizen conservationist, selected from nationally submitted nominations. Ms. Catto also funded a National Public Radio series on how climate change has affected individuals and communities worldwide.

She, along with her husband, established the Fellowship for a Sustainable Future, or the Catto Fellows, at the Aspen Institute. She is a contributing editor of the American Journalism Review, a magazine for which she served as publisher from 1980 to 1987. She has written for that magazine, The Washington Post in this country and the Independent, the Sunday Times and the Guardian in London on press, political and environmental issues. She has published a novel under a pseudonym. As a columnist on issues on the environment and politics, Ms. Catto writes a blog for the huffingtonpost.com. President Clinton appointed her to the Advisory Board of the National Parks System in 1993 and President Nixon appointed her to the Kennedy Center’s Presidential Advisory Committee on the Arts. Ms. Catto is also a former trustee of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Ms. Catto is President of Crockett Street Management, LLC, an investment company. She founded Elk Mountain Builders, Inc. a Colorado company with a focus on energy efficient construction. She served as Vice Chairman of H&C Communications, Inc. a broadcasting company of network affiliated television stations. Ms. Catto accompanied her husband, Henry E. Catto, in his diplomatic missions abroad while he was ambassador to El Salvador, the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and to Great Britain. Henry Catto is chairman emeritus of the Atlantic Council and served as Director of USIA, as well as assistant secretary of the Defense Department. She and Mr. Catto have four children and eleven grandchildren. Currently she lives in San Antonio, Texas and Woody Creek, Colorado.