SPEAKER BIOS
Ralph Bloemers
Co-Founder and Senior Staff Attorney, Crag Law Center
Ralph Bloemers is co-founder and Senior Staff Attorney for the Crag Law Center, a non-profit that works for communities to protect and defend the Pacific Northwest's natural legacy. The organization provides legal aid to local residents, conservation organizations, fishing clubs, recreational organizations and tribes. Crag works to enforce the laws on the books, protect and restore wild landscapes and ensure environmental justice for communities.
Bloemers grew up on a cheese farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. After high school, he left for Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to study political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He then worked abroad in the insurance industry in Munich, Germany, and then moved to Salem, Oregon to attend law school at Willamette University. He
completed an externship at 1000 Friends of Oregon and a fellowship at The Nature Conservancy where he learned about environmental, land use, and natural resources work.
He studied international environmental law in Holland and then returned to Willamette to graduate Cum Laude in 1998. After law school, he practiced intellectual property, securities and finance law at Oregon’s largest law firm for almost three years. He left the firm to commit his energy to build upon his pro bono endeavors and progressive causes and in 2001 he co-founded Crag Law Center with Chris Winter.
Bloemers is a member of the Oregon and Washington State Bars. He is admitted to practice in the Federal District of Oregon, the Western District of Washington and the Eastern District of Washington. Ralph has developed a specialty in public lands and natural resources law and has worked with dozens of clients throughout the Pacific Northwest, California and Alaska since Crag Law Center’s founding.
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For over 18 years Bloemers has advised community-based conservation groups, recreation clubs, and local residents throughout the West on the conservation of our forests, including sensitive burned landscapes. He has spent countless hours in our forests with firefighters, expert scientists and ecologists. He has led educational forums in communities directly affected by wildfires, documented post-fire recovery through film and volunteered to rebuild trails in burned areas.