The Transformative Power of Nature: A Q&A with Executive Director Justin Strasburger

In April 2026, the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s Board of Directors selected Justin Strasburger as our next executive director. Justin has deep roots in Maine’s outdoors, a profound love, like many of us, for all of us, for the state’s pristine natural resources and a fierce determination to protect the places we all love.

As host of NRCM’s Podcast “Voices for Maine’s Environment,” I recently sat down with Justin to learn more about why he’s so excited about advancing the unique role NRCM plays as a fearless watchdog for Maine’s environment and the work we do to mobilize the power of everyday people coming together to build a lasting legacy through policy and systems change.

Here’s our conversation edited for length and clarity:

We’re thrilled that you’re leading NRCM at this important time for Maine, our environment, and our communities. Can you give our listeners a quick introduction to who Justin Strasburger is and your connection to the outdoors in Maine?

In many ways, I feel like my whole life has been leading me to this moment in ways that I think I’ve been aware of and many that I was less aware of. My journey in Maine starts before I could even crawl. My dad built a camp up on Long Pond near Jackman about 50 plus years ago, so I’ve been spending summers there my entire life. It’s remote, it’s gorgeous, and it’s steeped in nature.

As I got older, I was very interested in exploring more. I started spending parts of my summers at Camp Kieve in Nobleboro, and through their amazing wilderness tripping opportunities I got to explore all different parts of the state.

The Allagash Wilderness Waterway, which is just honestly still one of the most gorgeous places I’ve ever been in my entire life. Katahdin and Baxter State Park, as well as the Saint Croix River. And it just cemented my love for this amazing state, my love for being outdoors, and the transformative power that nature has to force us to slow down.

I was lucky enough to get to go to Bowdoin College, which shaped my life in lots of ways, including meeting my wife there. One of the big things that made me want to go to Bowdoin was the Outing Club and the opportunity to be an outing club leader there.

From a career perspective, I ended up in educational nonprofits, first in New York and then in the Boston area focused on helping students from low-income backgrounds get to and through college. Along the way I found a real passion for the power of nonprofit leadership and the power that leaders have to really leverage the power of the collective of a team in an organization to really move things forward in big and exciting ways.

When the pandemic hit, I like lots of folks moved up here to be closer to family, but the other thing that drew us here was this desire to have our kids be able to experience the kind of outdoor childhood that we grew up having. So, in many ways, there are lots of things tying me back here to Maine and tying me to the outdoors.

I’m wondering if you could share some wonderful moments with your family exploring Maine. Because for so many of us, that’s what drives our interest or our work at NRCM: that deep connection and that love for Maine’s environment and for the outdoors.

We love getting outside with our boys as much as we can. Going on hikes and exploring this incredible state. One of our favorite spots is Squirrel Point Lighthouse, which is out in Arrowsic. It’s a great out-and-back. The trail rambles alongside the Kennebec, and you get out to this gorgeous lighthouse. It’s a perfect spot to have lunch. And what I love about that hike, less so now that my kids are a little older, but it’s true about many of these hikes that we do, is seeing how their mindset shifts at a certain point and they just become fully present. They’re immersing themselves in nature, and they’re excited to go run ahead and climb a tree or explore the area around the lighthouse and the beach and that sort of thing. And by the end, we almost have to like drag them back onto the trail to get home.

That to me is what this is all about. Losing yourself in nature and helping them lose themselves in nature and being able to provide them so easily with those opportunities. The accessibility of the outdoors here in Maine is a real blessing and a gift.

The thing I love about that example you just shared is that it just continues to amaze me that these places are so often in our backyard wherever you live in Maine. That’s the legacy I think we’re trying to continue.

Absolutely. I’ll give you one more real example quickly on that. At the end of our street is this wonderful, gorgeous network of trails. It’s now newly preserved as the Maquoit Woods made possible by the excellent work of the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust. We didn’t even know that was there when we moved in. On one of our explorations a couple of years ago, we discovered out of nowhere a beaver dam and lodge. And for our kids to be able to get down and get up close to take a look and pique their curiosity, literally steps from our front door is just…there’s nothing like it.

You’re right, experiences like that are incredible. You have spent your life dedicated to impact driven, this mission focused work, most recently as the first executive director at Full Plates, Full Potential. Can you just talk a little bit about that experience there and how you see it as informing your work here at NRCM?

Yeah, I learned so much in this role. I think one of the things that got me excited about joining Full Plates Full Potential was the potential, if you’ll excuse the pun, to work on systems change in a real way. The idea of engaging in advocacy and policy work — in the work of building movements — that is the crux of how we actually make meaningful change.

I approached it from the perspective of how are we centering the folks closest to the work always. And that built a ton of trust, but it also made us really powerful advocates because we were speaking authentically and we were speaking accurately. We had a lot of folks that we knew had our back, and they knew we had their backs. We passed major legislation like school meals for all and built some significant progress on initiatives like farms to school.

What I learned most is the power of people. And within that, it was exciting to see how that works here in Maine, both the legislative process, of course, but also the subtle ways in which culturally there’s a difference here with an intense desire to collaborate. There is tremendous possibility here around people who are primed to be organized and mobilized.

As you mentioned, your career began working with organizations that support students from low-income backgrounds to and through college. Curious about what lessons you learned from that work. How does that experience inform your leadership now?

I think in two key ways. One, ultimately what we were working on there was solving a challenge of a lack of access. Access for these students to systems, to power, to opportunity. In thinking about how you work on that problem, I think about how do you use the power you have to break down those systems of inequity, to open up the doors, to provide access? So, one of the big things I learned there is wherever possible have that kind of open door and be open source wherever possible. Put the information out there so that everybody can take advantage of it. That’s why I think about democratizing information and democratize opportunity as much as we can.

Second, is the need for systems change. Direct service work like I was doing there is critically important, but it’s ultimately a band aid. If we want to get to a place where those resources are not needed anymore, we have to solve the underlying challenge, which is much harder and forces very hard and tough conversations. But ultimately the path to get there is through movements, policy, and advocacy work. So that’s really, I think, what oriented me to saying that’s the kind of work I want to be doing moving forward in my career, because that feels like that’s where the impact is.

Right now, we’ve got this concentration of money and power in our politics. We’re seeing attacks on our nation’s strong environmental legacy, on our response to climate change. I know that’s disheartening for many people. And it strikes me that nonprofits and community groups play such an important role showing us what’s possible, especially in a moment like this. How do you think about the role of nonprofits in society?

What makes me feel like this is a particularly complicated question is that I actually think in some ways community driven nonprofits get over relied on by society as permanent solutions in ways that they just can never be. Just to be clear, that’s not the fault of those nonprofits. It’s this sort of societal orientation to see this as a permanent solution, but then not resourcing it as the permanent solution.

However, I do think that the critical role that nonprofits play is twofold. First, it’s showing us the way forward. Helping organize people around a shared vision and helping people see the ways in which while an individual might struggle to make change, when we get a few of us together and a few more together and they get a few more together, all of a sudden we have a big group of people who have much more of a potential to impact change.

Second, nonprofits have a very specific focus area and identify this is a problem we are trying to solve. We have a strategy for how we’re doing it. We have professional staff usually that are working on that. And we have ways for folks who are interested in this work to support this and help us achieve that.

Holding that sort of that focus is really important in a world when all of us have demands for our attention coming at us left, right, and center. It’s important for there to be entities that are singularly focused. That’s a key role that NRCM plays when it comes to the environmental work in the state.

What should organizations like NRCM be thinking about as we’re trying to build power to confront corporations and billionaires who have taken control of politics and policymaking in the US?

The biggest thing is we need more people getting off the sidelines. We need to meet people where they are and find ways to connect them to our vision of what Maine looks like 50 to 60 years from now.

You know, I honestly believe there’s not a person in this state that has a different vision for what they want Maine to look like on that future timeframe. That’s not to say everyone in the state agrees with everything that we’re focused on. But if we start with vision and know that that’s a place that we can connect on, that gives us an opportunity.

How we get there is important. I’m not trying to suggest it’s not, but if we can get more people to feel like their day-to-day lives, their lived experience, has a place, has a role to play in achieving that vision. That’s how we’re ultimately going to be successful in getting folks off the sidelines where we need them to be and building a bigger coalition, which is going to be so critical because those, as you said, powerful corporations and billionaires, have unlimited resources, and they are bringing them to bear.

It strikes me that one thing that people in Maine value a lot is community. Coming together in so many different ways as community.

That really speaks to me, because there’s this inherent value of community and then we’ve got this shared value of the environment. There’s real potential there.

You’ve talked a lot about the power of coalitions and intentional partnership in this work. Can you just dive a little bit more into that?

Strong movements give us our best chance to win. Ultimately, if we are not as an organization centering ourselves ahead of the movement, we’re never going to win. We’re never going to be successful. It’s about understanding that the vision that matters is a movement vision. It’s not NRCM’s vision. It is a vision that we all hold, and we all have a part to play in it. And if we’re not all playing our parts in the way and to the best of our ability, none of us are going to get where we need to get.

I want us to be thinking about how we are resourcing and supporting the movement so that we are making us all stronger and making sure we’re staying connected. What I think that means is someone must make sure that things are moving forward. Someone must make sure that things are following up and that everybody is being brought into this in the way that it needs to be, in the way that they need to be, in the way that’s going to really leverage all of our strengths. Sometimes that means slowing down so that we’re making sure we’re building the trust amongst each other, and making sure we’re really, truly listening to one another so that then we’re able to go faster later.

NRCM has such a huge opportunity, given the influence we have at the State House for example, to really make sure that when we’re up there speaking, we’re not just speaking on behalf of NRCM, but we’re authentically speaking on behalf of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other individuals, organizations, because we’ve taken the time to listen and understand, and they know we have their back and we know they have our back. I think that’s the real opportunity. And I think when we’re at our best, that’s how we’re operating. And so that’s really front of mind for me as we move forward because that’s where the power is.

A few of our colleagues recently joined author and scientist Ayanna Johnson for a climate dance party at Wolfe’s Neck Farm as the last stop on the tour for her new book, What If We Get It Right. That was a reminder for me about her essay on hope, which I’ve thought a lot about because it’s a word I’ve used a lot in my work. Ayanna talks about how hope is a word that in many ways is insufficient. She encourages us in Terry Tempest Williams words “to make vows to something deeper than hope.” She offers truth, courage, joy, solutions, love, collaboration, community, possibility. That was just such a powerful reframing for me personally.

Do you have a mentor or an author or another voice that you sort of sought guidance from that’s provided you with the courage to do this work?

I’m reading Ayanna Johnson’s book right now. I’ll start there because her ability to not sugarcoat what we’re facing but turn it to the place of joy that actually will motivate action is truly powerful. There’s a quote of hers that I’ll share here just because I think it’s very powerful:

“That feeling of awe that rushes through us when we get up close to the natural world is a signal. Like all strong feelings in the heart and gut, it is telling us something about what matters, about where we can find joy and connection, about what is valuable and sacred, about how to orient a moral compass in a decaying world. In other words, it is telling us how to survive.”

That message is so clear. If you’re uncertain about where to be or where to orient, just go touch grass for a little bit. And there’s something so powerful in its simplicity. I think sometimes there’s a feeling like this is complex, and it is complex and there’s only so much you could oversimplify. But some of this stuff is actually very simple. And I think that’s a nice lesson.

Another person that I really have found truly valuable in my leadership journey is Brene Brown. In particular, I love the idea of how she thinks about courage. She talks a lot about how in modern days, courage has come to be equated with heroics. But the actual root of the Latin word means heart.

How Brene likes to think about courage is in everyday courage. We’re not all out slaying dragons. Everyday courage is about putting your heart and vulnerability on the line by just showing up authentically every day. In this kind of challenging environment as we face complex issue like climate change that feel so massive, we often think, what can I as one person do? There’s something quietly powerful about remembering that just showing up authentically and putting yourself out there everyday is a courageous act. It reminds me to try to show up every day courageously.

The idea of vulnerability is also powerful to me as a leader and as a person. I view vulnerability as key to building deep relationships. It means being open to the idea that we’re not perfect, that we don’t have all the answers as individuals, and that maybe we need to go seek other people to help us understand things. Ultimately, if we’re going to cross lines of difference, it’s going to start with people showing up with a little more vulnerability and a little less of those dragon-slaying heroics. That kind of courage isn’t just critical to this work but also in going through life in a healthy, productive, community-centered kind of way.

NRCM is powered by our members and supporters. Our work is only possible because of all of them. As we close out this great conversation, what message would you like to deliver to those members and supporters?

We need you. That’s as simple as I can put it. You know, I could say we need you now more than ever, but we will always need you. If there’s been one theme from this conversation, I hope it’s been about the power of community.

Without you, without everybody in this state, thinking about what their role is to play in this and finding a way to contribute, we’re not going to win.

I’d love for us at NRCM to be able to give you support in taking those actions and finding that role. We’re here to help you figure out how best to connect in with this work because I guarantee there’s a way. There’s something that’s going to be valuable to you in our work and I would love nothing more than to help you find it.

—Voices for Maine Environment interview with host Colin Durrant. Listen to the full podcast here.