Ken Rait

PROFILE

Ken Rait, of Pew’s Portland, Oregon, office, leads work to conserve western lands, including collaborating with local partners and the Bureau of Land Management to balance conservation and development. He also manages efforts to defend the national Roadless Rule and other bedrock conservation laws. 

Before coming to Pew, Rait worked at the Campaign for America’s Wilderness, and ran the heritage forests campaign that protected 60 million acres of roadless national forest lands through establishment of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. He was conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council and spent seven years as issues director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance overseeing the campaign that resulted in the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Rait also served as conservation chair of the Sierra Club Rincon Group in Tucson, Arizona.   

He holds a bachelor’s degree in physical geography and a master’s in environmental affairs and water resource management from Clark University.