About

Described in a 2010 Nation profile article as “a straight-talking, get-things-done kind of guy, more at ease toiling behind the scenes in environmental struggles than serving as a personification of them,” Scott Parkin is a trainer, coordinator and organizer in social justice and environmental movements. He has worked with anti-corporate global justice, anti-war, labor, environmental and climate movements in North America, Europe and Australia.

Originally from the suburbs of Dallas, TX, Scott holds a bachelors in Criminology from Appalachian State University and a masters in U.S. history from Texas A&M-Commerce. He has worked in a variety of private and public sectors from the aviation industry to small community colleges to San Francisco based environmental non-profits.

From 2001-2005, while living and working in Houston, TX as a grassroots organizer, he organized campaigns against such notorious corporations as ExxonMobil, Halliburton and Charles Hurwitz’s Maxxam, as well as George Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, the Australian government detained and forcibly removed him as a “direct or indirect threat to Australian national security” after giving a series of trainings on non-violent civil disobedience and strategy.

Currently, he is a Senior Campaigner in Rainforest Action Network’s Climate and Energy program and is a member of Rising Tide North America’s core organizing collective. In his time at RAN, he has led campaigns against Wall Street banks, mountaintop removal coal mining and the Keystone XL pipeline.

He has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times The Houston Chronicle, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Company), Democracy Now, Inside Climate News, Vice and The Nation. His writings have been published in the Earth First! Journal, Znet, Counterpunch, Clamor, the Photojournalist, Earth Island Journal, Alternet, Truthout and Common Dreams.