This thoughtful outdoorswoman, raised on the dangers of an over-powerful state, is well suited to be our next Champion Woman Profile
Independent Women’s Forum is delighted to showcase our own Gabriella Hoffman, Director of our new Center for Energy and Conservation and a widely-published writer and media strategist, as the next entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
Gabby is an avid outdoorswoman who hunts and fishes and brings a special perspective to conservation and energy issues. “Everyone talks about energy or climate and we wanted to include conservation, which would mean also tackling the set of issues that I focus on—the Endangered Species Act, public land, hunting, and fishing as conservation tools,” says Gabby.
She also has a fascinating background. Gabby’s perspective was shaped by her parents’ flight to the United States from then-Soviet-occupied Lithuania. “I had no choice but to be a right-leaning person,” Gabriella says, laughing. “Lithuania is a very prosperous country today, but it wasn’t under communism.” Her parents arrived in 1985, and she was born a few years later.
She is a 2012 graduate of the University of California at San Diego, where she majored in political science. Gabriella’s response to what she saw going on her liberal campus was to bring David Horowitz, the conservative writer, to present a different point of view—even if she had to take out a personal loan to do so.
How is the conservative conservationist to distinguish herself from the doctrinaire preservationists who often seek to erase the human footprint? “True conservation is receiving human input as a good thing,” she says. “Humans have recognized the errors of their ways. We hunted wild game almost to extinction. We recognized the error of that and didn’t want to replicate that. That’s why we’ve been behind reintroducing species through hunting and fishing. All those monies go back to restoring species, and in nearly a hundred years we’ve seen the resurgence of so many different kinds of animals—white-tailed deer, black bear, grizzly bear, and, oh gosh, turkey.”
This thoughtful outdoorswoman, raised on the dangers of an over-powerful state, is well suited to ensure that IWF’s Center for Energy and Conservation has a great impact on the issues that she holds dear.
