Jackie Dragon is a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace USA. Jackie has been campaigning to protect important places in the ocean since 2008. Her current focus is on the Bering Sea, where she fights to conserve the largest submarine canyons in the world from destructive industrial fishing practices.
In California’s National Marine Sanctuaries, she has worked to reduce ocean noise pollution and the threat of ship strikes on whales from large commercial vessels; and in the Arctic, where climate change hastens the melting icescape, she stands against drilling for oil in a place where the inevitable oil spill simply cannot be cleaned up.
Jackie holds a conservation seat on the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council and is the co-chair of a Joint Working Group of the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank Sanctuary Advisory Councils on Vessel Strikes and Acoustic Impacts. The working group, an effort spearheaded by Jackie in 2008, has assembled experts on whales, acoustics, and ship strikes from conservation, science, and the shipping industry to develop recommendations for the sanctuaries. Significantly, this multi-stakeholder group, which includes representatives for more than 90 percent of US shipping companies, delivered full-consensus recommendations for dynamic management of the sanctuaries, calling for large vessels to alter their speed or course when whales are present in the shipping lanes.
Before joining Greenpeace in 2011 Jackie also initiated a campaign to strengthen regulations for fuel transfers in California’s waters following a 2009 bunkering accident where a tanker filling up with bunker fuel spilled oil into San Francisco Bay. Joining forces with Congressional candidate Jared Huffman (then Assembly member), Jackie developed a broad coalition of cities, and environmental and fishing groups to support the effort and successfully shepherded two bills through the State legislature. The first bill, AB234 was ultimately vetoed by Governor a Schwarzenegger following intense lobbying by the oil industry, but its successor, AB1112 was signed into law this year by Governor Brown.
Before becoming an ocean advocate Jackie gained invaluable experience leading campaigns to organize healthcare workers across California for the fastest growing Union of healthcare workers. She prevailed in every election and arbitration she led, negotiated some of the best wages and working conditions for jail nurses, and successfully won back jobs and pay for wrongfully terminated employees.
