Resilience & Rebuilding: The Los Angeles of Tomorrow

Resilience & Rebuilding is an open ended series of virtual programs exploring the impacts of the recent devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, offering a container for conversation and pathways for rebuilding that foreground ecology, community, and collective wellbeing.

The third program in the series will look to a future LA, reimagining a more resilient and environmentally responsible city of tomorrow. Speakers will consider visionary frameworks including architecture that emphasizes the commons, improved insurance systems, traditional ecological knowledge, and artist-led activism.

The goal of Resilience & Rebuilding is to develop guidance for rebuilding efforts, from within and beyond the art sector, over the months and years to come. In addition to inputs from scheduled speakers, we encourage attendees to share their testimony and questions in the chat as part of this evolving document.

Resilience & Rebuilding is supported by Nora McNeely Hurley and the Manitou Fund. The series is jointly organized by MOCA Environmental Council Co-Chairs Andrea Bowers and David Johnson, Environmental Council Advisor John Quigley, and Environmental & Sustainability Strategist Kelsey Shell with support from Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate.

Malin Akerman is a Swedish-Canadian actress known for her roles in films like Watchmen, The Heartbreak Kid, and 27 Dresses and TV series such as Trophy Wife. Beyond her acting career, Malin leverages her platform to advocate for a more sustainable and eco-conscious world.

She has been actively involved with the Environmental Media Association (EMA), serving on its board and participating in initiatives that blend entertainment with environmental advocacy. She has co-hosted the EMA Awards Gala, celebrating media projects that inspire eco-conscious living, and has spoken at the EMA Impact Summit.

John K. Chan is a Los Angeles architect active in wildfire recovery efforts and Design Director of Formation Association, an environmental design firm practicing architecture as a cultural project. When client homes in Altadena were destroyed by the Eaton Fire, Chan gained firsthand insight into how recovery challenges in LA County signaled growing dangers now threatening all California communities in the wildland urban interface.

Chan has since applied his interdisciplinary coordination experience as an architect to address the complex difficulties contributing to fire devastation in LA. He has recently become founding participant of the Wildfire Recovery Think Tank (WRTT) — a fast-emerging volunteer network of cross-sector thought leaders and wildfire victims expanding the taxonomy of recovery to encompass social, cultural, and multigenerational frameworks in the arenas of community, economy, and ecology.

A native Angeleno, Chan's evolving cultural leadership in Los Angeles takes shape through his formative experience across large-scale architecture and planning, his municipally adjacent experience as a board member of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, and his ongoing wildfire recovery efforts broadening from local to state-wide initiatives through the Wildfire Recovery Think Tank.

James Thornton launched ClientEarth in 2007, sparking fundamental change in the way environmental protections are made and enforced across Europe. Now operating globally, ClientEarth uses advocacy, litigation and research to address the greatest challenges of our time – including nature loss and climate change.

Prior to ClientEarth, James spent many years as an environmental lawyer and social entrepreneur. A member of the bars of New York, California, and the Supreme Court of the United States, and a solicitor of England and Wales, he moved from Wall Street law practice to found the Citizens’ Enforcement Project at NRDC in New York. Here he brought 80 federal lawsuits against corporations to enforce the Clean Water Act after the Reagan Administration had stopped enforcing the law. He won these cases and embarrassed the government into enforcing the law again.

James then founded the Los Angeles Office of NRDC, which does internationally important environmental work. He was Editor-in-Chief of the New York University Law Review, where he later served as Adjunct Associate Professor of Environmental Law. He has also been an executive in several other sectors of the non-profit world.

The New Statesman has named James as one of 10 people who could change the world. The Lawyer has picked him as one of the top 100 lawyers in the UK. In 2016, he was named as one of the 1,000 most influential people in London. He has twice won Leader of the Year at the Business Green Awards. The Financial Times awarded him its Special Achievement accolade at the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards.

He graduated from Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, with departmental honours in philosophy. He is the author of an environmental legal thriller, Immediate Harm, and a volume of poetry on science and environment, The Feynman Challenge. Among other roles and honours he is a Conservation Fellow of the Zoological Society of London; a fellow of the Ashoka Foundation; Member of the Advisory Committee of the International Coalition for Green Development on China’s Belt and Road Initiative; Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Bristol; and Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Samantha Johnson Yang is a Tongva biologist, basket weaver, and science illustrator. She currently works for her tribe developing educational materials for students of all ages in the LA County area interested in learning more Traditional Ecological Knowledge. She is also the founder and lead of the Tongva Land Stewardship Crew, a group of tribal youth whose work in invasive species removal saved homes during the Eaton Canyon Fire of 2025.