Meet the people leading the fight to preserve and protect the most heavily visited and most popular wilderness in the national wilderness system.

Sacha Casillas
Membership Director

Sacha joined the Friends staff full time in September 2007 after being an intern during the summer of 2005. She received her bachelor’s degree from University of Wisconsin- La Crosse in Environmental Biology with minors in Chemistry and Spanish. After graduation she spent a year participating in sea turtle conservation efforts in Magdalena Bay, Baja California Sur, Mexico. This past summer she worked as a naturalist at a nature reserve to learn more about MN wildlife and issues affecting the state. Sacha enjoys hiking, going to the beach, spending time on the north shore of Lake Superior with her family and watching the sunset over a lake or other body of water.


Ron Meador
Executive Director

Ron joined Friends on June 1, 2007. He had recently stepped down as an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune after nearly 12 years in which he wrote something in the range of 1200 editorials, with special focus on environmental and science matters. He also wrote commentaries on issues of particular interest to him, among them the long decline in Minnesota’s water-quality and the long-past-due protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska which he visited several years ago. Ron joined the Star Tribune in 1980. Before moving to the editorial board, he served as an assistant managing editor, leading teams in the production of several dozen of the paper’s top investigative and interpretive projects. He earlier worked as a copy editor for the New York Times and for the Louisville, KY, Courier Journal.

The Wilderness Society, a national conservation organization, presented Ron its Aldo Leopold Award in 2000 for his consistently outstanding environmental editorials. He received the Page One Award for editorials from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists in 2002 for an editorial about issues facing Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota. In 2006 he won the Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award in recognition of an editorial criticizing the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s lax regulation of mercury.

Ron earned his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University at Bloomington with a dual major in journalism and sociology in 1975. He was awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2001-2002. And between 1998 and 2003 he had four fellowships with the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources to study environmental issues in various regions of the country, including the Great Lakes.

Ron is an avid paddler and outdoorsman. He lives in Minneapolis and has a grown son, Ben, who also lives and works in the city.

Brian Pasko
Policy Director

Brian joined the Friends in November 2007 after serving as the Sierra Club’s lobbyist in Minnesota since 2004. While at the Sierra Club, Brian was a principal negotiator for the environmental community in the passage of nation-leading laws related to mercury, renewable energy, and global warming. Prior to becoming a lobbyist, Brian practiced law and, among other subjects, litigated federal Clean Air and Clean Water Act cases on behalf of private citizens and non-profit organizations.

Brian earned his bachelor’s degree in 1999 from Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, where he graduated magna cum laude and was a triple major in environmental policy, environmental studies, and biology. In 1998, Brian was awarded a coveted Morris K. Udall award for his achievement and commitments in environmental policy. In 2002, Brian earned his juris doctorate from the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College, along with a certificate in environmental and natural resources law. During law school, Brian served as an associate editor of the Law Review and published research relating to national forest policy and the development of national forest management plans.

Outside of his work for the Friends, Brian is an active member of the Minnesota Bar Association’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Section, and edits the Section’s quarterly newsletter. Additionally, he serves as the Chair of his neighborhood organization in Minneapolis, and was appointed to the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission by Mayor R.T. Rybak in 2003.

Brian is an amateur photographer, avid hiker, and an experienced Wilderness canoeist. He, his wife, and their dog travel to the Boundary Waters as often as they have the chance. You can always view photos of their recent adventures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/brian.pasko.