Past Keynote Speakers

John Abrams – 2008

John Abrams is co-founder and CEO of South Mountain Company, a 32-year-old employee owned design/build and renewable energy company in West Tisbury Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Business Ethics magazine awarded South Mountain its 2005 National Award for Workplace Democracy. John’s book COMPANIES WE KEEP: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place was published by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2005, and an expanded second edition is being released this fall. He serves with the Island Housing Trust and Island Affordable Housing Fund boards, the Island Plan steering committee, and lives with his wife Chris in the Island Cohousing Neighborhood in West Tisbury, which was developed by his company.
www.somoco.com  

Margot Adler – 2006

Margot Adler is a journalist and correspondent for National Public Radio. She grew up mostly in New York City and worked for WBAI, FM 99.5, the Pacifica Radio outlet in that city. She later joined NPR in 1979 as a general assignment reporter, and has since worked on a great many pieces dealing with subjects as diverse as the death penalty, the right to die movement, the response to the war in Kosovo, computer gaming, the drug ecstasy, geek culture, children and technology, and Pokémon. Since 9/11, she has focused much of her work on stories exploring the human factors in New York City, from the loss of loved ones, homes and jobs, to work in the relief effort. She is presently the host of Justice Talking, and she is a regular voice on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Adler wrote Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. This book is considered a watershed in American Neopagan circles, as it provided the first comprehensive look at the nature-based religions in the US, and became what was for many the first point of contact with the larger subculture.

Antwi Akom – 2010

Founded the Wangari Maathai Center for Economic, Educational and Environmental Design in 2010, an organization that harnesses the expertise and imagination of leading academics, community leaders, and decision-makers to address policy and planning issues like energy, education, waste, water, advanced manufacturing, and design. The WMC’s most recent project is “Greening the Educational Industrial Complex” which is pioneering “Green STEM” curricular pathways that combine art and social media with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to create college and career pathways in environmental and clean energy fields for low-income and vulnerable youth. In 2009, Dr. Akom co-founded the Environmental Sustainability Planning Network (ESPN), a national learning network that drafts local and regional climate action plans to reduce carbon emissions, secure land tenure, improve economic opportunities, build infrastructure, and improve environmental health. The culmination of this work will be a Climate Justice Youth Bill of Rights to be unveiled on Earth day 2012. Dr. Akom is a 2010 recipient of a RIMI Investigator Award supported by the National Center on Minority and Health Disparities. He is currently co-editing a solution-oriented book with Dr. Jason Corburn on Race, Climate Justice, and the Politics of Pollution in Cities and Schools. Dr. Akom earned a BA from the University of California Berkeley, an MA from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology, Urban Education (STEM), and African American Studies at San Francisco State University and has been a research fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change and at the University of San Francisco’s Institute for Health Policy Studies.

Will Allen – 2009

Will Allen, is a former Professional basketball player in the American Basketball Association and European Professional League, the first African American basketball player at the University of Miami, Florida, and also a farmer and community activist, dedicated to supporting low-income and small family farmers and bringing healthy, affordable food to urban areas. Will, is the founder and president of the Rainbow Farmer’s Cooperative. One of the only African American farmer’s in the State of Wisconsin, Allen has struggled vigorously to alleviate the plight of the small family farmer. He works a 100-acre farm in Oak Creek, WI and is responsible for organizing most of the farmers markets in Milwaukee.
Will is also the CEO of Growing Power, a national not for profit organization supporting the development of community food systems. He has over fifty years experience in farming, marketing and distributing food and has shared this knowledge with youth, adults, community groups, immigrants, farmers, and consumers. Will is referred to by many as a modern day George Washington Carver, a person that Will greatly admirers. Will Allen is known as an innovator and creator of food systems that are leading efforts in getting good food to all people world wide.
Will has developed an innovative bio-intensive growing system using worms. This system is being used in urban and rural agriculture projects around the world. He has also developed a system to grow food in the winter without conventional heating system. Growing Power’s Community Food Center in Milwaukee, WI is considered a model for communities worldwide. Will believes that food is the cornerstone in building healthy communities and that we have a responsibility to pass on our knowledge to youth and adults about food for future sustainable food systems.
www.growingpower.org  

Ray Anderson – 2006

Since the days after his graduation from the Georgia Institute of Technology as an industrial engineer, Ray Anderson has applied his entrepreneurial spirit to building one of the world's largest interior furnishings companies. After founding Interface in 1973, Ray and his company revolutionized the commercial floorcovering industry by producing America's first free-lay carpet tiles. Now, Ray has embarked on a mission to “be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits — by 2020 — and in doing so, to become restorative through the power of influence. He’s leading a worldwide effort to pioneer the processes of sustainable development.
Today, Interface is the world leader in the design, production and sales of modular carpet, and a leading producer of broadloom carpet and commercial fabrics. The entrepreneurial drive and competitive spirit that in 1973 drove Ray to found Interface was the same catalyst for an environmental awakening that has once again transformed an industry. Today, Interface stands at the forefront of a new industrial revolution. The company has reduced its environmental footprint significantly, redesigning processes and products, pioneering new technologies and reducing or eliminating waste and harmful emissions while increasing the use of renewable materials and sources of energy.
www.interfaceglobal.com

Kenny Ausubel – 2008

Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, journalist and filmmaker. He is the founder and co-president of Bioneers, a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to disseminating practical and visionary solutions for restoring Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and healing our human communities. He launched the annual Bioneers Conference in 1990 with his producing partner and wife Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder and co-president. The Conference attracts over 3,000 people each year to the national conference in San Rafael, California, and is beamed by satellite simulcast to close to 20 localized Bioneers conferences across the US and Canada to another 10,000 attendees. Kenny serves as executive producer of the Bioneers plenary series airing on Free Speech TV and Link TV. He acted as a central advisor to Leonardo DiCaprio’s feature documentary The 11th Hour, and appears in the film. Kenny co-founded the national company Seeds of Change in 1989 and served as CEO until 1994 to restore “backyard biodiversity” into the food web through marketing organic, biodiverse heirloom seeds to gardeners. Previously he produced several documentary films about alternative medicine including the award-winning feature documentary film Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime about the medical politics surrounding the suppression of promising unconventional cancer therapies. Kenny founded and operates Inner Tan Productions, a feature film development company, and has written two screenplays. He attended Yale and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1972. Kenny lives in the mountains outside Santa Fe, New Mexico with Nina and their two dogs.
www.bioneers.org  

Michael Ben-Eli – 2010

Is founder of the Sustainability Laboratory, established in order to develop and demonstrate breakthrough approaches to sustainability practices, expanding prospects and producing positive, life affirming impacts on people and ecosystems in all parts of the world.
An international management consultant, Michael pioneered applications of Systems Thinking and Cybernetics in management and organization. Over the years he worked on synthesizing strategy issues in many parts of the world and in diverse institutional settings, ranging from small high technology firms to multinational enterprises, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care and educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and international multilateral organizations.
In recent years, he has focused primarily on issues related to sustainability and sustainable development, working to help inspire leaders in business, government, community, and youth accelerate a peaceful transition to a sustainable future.
Dr. Ben-Eli graduated from the Architectural Association in London and later received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Cybernetics at Brunel University, where he studied under Gordon Pask. He was a close associate of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on projects involving research on advanced structural systems and exploration of issues related to the management of technology and world resources for the advantage of all.
www.sustainabilitylabs.org

Janine M. Benyus – 2006

Janine Benyus is a natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including her latest − Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that models a prairie, businesses that run like redwood forests).
Janine has cultivated a deep knowledge of the natural world, beginning with direct observation in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, continuing in habitats from Maine to West Virginia where she worked as a backcountry guide, and now, in her home wilds of Montana.
In addition to her biomimicry work, Janine teaches interpretive writing, lectures at the University of Montana, and works towards restoring and protecting wild lands. She serves on a number of land use committees in her rural county.
Janine has received several awards including the 2009 Champion of the Earth award in Science & Innovation from the United Nations Environmental Programme, Rachel Carson Environmental Ethics Award, Lud Browman Award for Science Writing, Science Writing in Society Journalism Award, Barrows and Heinz Distinguished Lectureships, and has been honored as one of TIME International's Heros of the Environment.
www.janinebenyus.com  

Majora Carter – 2008

Majora Carter simultaneously addresses public health, poverty alleviation, and climate change adaptation as one of the nation’s pioneers in successful urban green-collar job training and placement systems. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 to achieve environmental equality through economically sustainable projects informed by community needs. Her work has earned numerous honors including Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People In Business, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, Essence Magazine’s 25 Most Influential African-Americans, and NY Post Liberty Medal for Lifetime Achievment. She is a board member of the Wilderness Society and CERES; and hosts the special public radio series: “The Promised Land” (thepromisedland.org). Her work now includes advising cities, foundations, universities, businesses, and communities around the world on unlocking their local economic potential to benefit everyone as President of the Majora Carter Group, LLC.
www.majoracartergroup.com  

Bob Cavnar – 2010

Bob Cavnar is a 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry with deep experience in operations, start-ups, turn-arounds, and management of both public and private companies. He was most recently President and Chief Executive Officer of Milagro Exploration, a large, privately held oil and gas exploration firm based in Houston, Texas with operations along the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi Gulf Coasts, and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Cavnar holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Southern Methodist University and completed the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School.
www.dailyhurricane.com

Robin Chase – 2009 

 Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. She also founded and leads Meadow Networks, a consulting firm that advises city, state, and federal government agencies about wireless applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development. Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world.
She served on the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation transition team, and the Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force. She is on the Board of the World Resources Institute. Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment, including Time 100 Most Influential People in the World. Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT's Sloan School of Management, and was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow.
www.robinchase.org  

Climbing poeTree - 2009

Depending on who you ask, you might hear about Alixa and Naima as mural painters, rabble rousers, or “exterior” decorators. They are as notorious for their fist-raising performances as they are for their arts-based political education workshops; as recognized for their visual art as they for Fashion Statement, their line of silk-screened clothing. Basically, Alixa and Naima are poets who moonlight as street artists, and infiltrate public schools and prisons with infectious ideas of how people can shape their own destinies.
www.climbingpoetree.com

Eliot Coleman – 2008

Eliot has over 30 years experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. He is the author of The New Organic Grower (Chelsea Green, 1989, revised, expanded second edition, 1995), Four Season Harvest (Chelsea Green, 1992, revised, expanded second edition, 1999) and The Winter Harvest Manual. He has contributed chapters to three scientific books on organic agriculture and has written extensively on the subject since 1975.
During his careers as a commercial market gardener, the director of agricultural research projects, and as a teacher and lecturer on organic gardening he has studied, practiced and perfected his craft. He has conducted study tours of organic farms, market gardens, orchards, and vineyards in Europe and has successfully combined European ideas with his own to develop and popularize a complete system of tools and equipment for organic vegetable growers. He shares that expertise through his lectures and writings, and has served as a tool consultant to a number of companies.
He and his wife Barbara Damrosch presently operate a commercial year-round market garden, in addition to horticultural research projects, at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine.
www.fourseasonfarm.com

John Cronin – 2005

For 35 years, John Cronin has dedicated his career to environment and innovation. For his accomplishments, Time magazine named him a “Hero for the Planet” and People magazine described him as “equal parts detective, scientist and public advocate.”
Cronin has worked as an advocate, legislative and congressional aide, commercial fisherman, professor, author and filmmaker. He is known internationally for his Hudson River work, for which the Wall Street Journal called him “a unique presence on America’s major waterways.” He served as Hudson Riverkeeper from 1983 – 2000, a position that has inspired a legacy of 200 Waterkeeper programs that fight pollution on six continents.
As Director and CEO of Beacon Institute, Cronin has adopted technological innovation as the non-profit research center’s central mission. The Institute’s River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON), created in collaboration with Clarkson University and IBM, is a network of sensors and robotics providing real-time data to researchers, policy makers and educators that will be emulated on rivers and estuaries worldwide.
www.thebeaconinstitute.org/institute/JohnCronin.php

Dean Cycon – 2007

Dean Cycon is the owner of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company, a certified 100% organic, fair trade coffee roasting operation in Orange, Massachusetts, USA. Dean has over twenty-five years of development work and activism in indigenous communities, including coffee villages, around the world. Dean is a co-founder of Coffee Kids (the first non-profit development group dedicated to coffeelands), and of Cooperative Coffees, the world’s first fair trade roaster’s cooperative. He created Dean’s Beans to prove that business can promote positive economic, social and environmental change at the third world source, create a great product, and be profitable at the same time. Dean’s Beans has grown steadily over the past fourteen years and has stayed on its mission. The company designs and funds people-centered development projects in the coffee lands in partnership with the growers, and returns a percentage of profits to the growers as a Social Equity Premium. In 2005, the company received a Best Practices Recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the 2004 Sustainability Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
www.deansbeans.com

David De Rothschild – 2010

David is an adventurer, environmentalist and the founder of myoo.com a group that primarily uses exploration and storytelling as a way to give nature a voice. David’s passion and commitment to action has seen him ski, dogsled and kite to both the North and South poles as well as visiting some of the world’s most remote and fragile regions in order to bring wide-spread media attention and, moreover, solutions to urgent global environmental issues. From March to July 2010, David and a crew of five undertook the latest expedition, the Plastiki, sailing across the Pacific Ocean on a catamaran made buoyant by 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles to beat waste. (www.theplastiki.com). David is recognized as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Clean up the World Ambassador, UNEP Climate Hero and a Young Global Leader respectively.
www.theplastiki.com

Paul Epstein – 2009

Paul R. Epstein, M.D., M.P.H. is Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and is a medical doctor trained in tropical public health. Paul has worked in medical, teaching and research capacities in Africa, Asia and Latin America and in 1993, coordinated an eight-part series on Health and Climate Change for the British medical journal, Lancet. He has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to assess the health impacts of climate change and develop health applications of climate forecasting and remote sensing.
chge.med.harvard.edu/about/faculty/epstein.html

Peter Forbes - 2005

Peter Forbes is the director of the Center for Whole Communities, an organization dedicated to the creation of a more just, balanced and healthy world. By exploring, honoring, and strengthening the connections between land, people and community CWC seeks new ways to integrate the needs of people and the land. They help community leaders and land organizations around the country to envision a more hopeful story of healthy people and healthy land which can lead to personal transformation, organizational change, and cultural shifts.
Forbes led the Trust for Public Land in New England in protecting threatened portions of Thoreau’s Walden Woods, protecting and revitalizing urban gardens and farms, and adding 20,000 acres of wild lands to New Hampshire's White Mountain National Forest. In 2001 he founded the Center for Land and People to foster land conservation where the emphasis is on building relationships between people and the land. In 2003, Peter and his wife, Helen Whybrow, bought Knoll Farm in Vermont to realize their dream of creating a place and a set of ideas that would unify and strengthen the conservation movement. Peter will talk about the relationship between people and the land, and help us to use a language of the land to explain the values that land conservation hopes to achieve in the world, namely health, relationship, citizenship and fairness, namely health, relationship, citizenship and fairness.
www.wholecommunities.org

Rha Goddess – 2008

Rha Goddess is a world renowned performance artist, activist and social entrepreneur. Her work has been featured in numerous international compilations, forums, and festivals. She has received rave industry reviews from Time Magazine, Ms. Magazine, XXL, Essence, The Source, among others. As CEO, of Divine Dime Entertainment, Ltd. she was the first women in Hip Hop to independently market and commercially distribute her music worldwide. Her activist work includes being the Creator and Executive Producer of the Young Woman's performance movement, We Got Issues! Rha's current projects include being the Executive Producer of The Hip Hop Mental Health Project and "The Meditations Trilogy." "LOW" Part I of the trilogy premiered for sold out audiences at the 2006 Humana Festival for New American Plays and for the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater in 2008. Rha is also a 2008 recipient of the National Museum for Voting Rights Freedom Flame Award for her outstanding work in the field of arts and civic engagement.
www.rhaworld.com

Seth Goldman – 2010

Seth Goldman is President and TeaEO of Honest Tea, the company he co-founded out of his home in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. Honest Tea is the nation’s best-selling organic bottled tea company, with products distributed through more than 30,000 outlets in every state, as well as overseas. Over the past twelve years the company has thrived with an annual compound growth rate of over 60 percent, as consumers have shifted toward healthier and more sustainable diets. In 2008, The Coca-Cola Company purchased a minority interest in Honest Tea, fueling further growth as Honest became the first organic and Fair Trade brand to move into the world’s largest beverage distribution system. Recently, Honest Tea was included on The Better World Shopping Guide’s list of "ten best companies on the planet based on their overall social and environmental record." Prior to co-founding Honest Tea, Goldman held management positions at theCalvert Group, a socially-responsible mutual fund company. He serves on the boards of the American Beverage Association, Bethesda Green, The Calvert Foundation and Happy Baby. In 2008, Goldman was named Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year for Greater Washington D.C.”
www.honesttea.com

Amy Goodman - 2011

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 900 television and radio stations in North America. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press.

Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is also one of the the first recipients, along with Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! "an inspiration"; PULSE named her one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

Stephan Harding - 2006

Stephan holds a doctorate in behavioral ecology from the University of Oxford, and has carried out ecological research in many parts of the world, including Venezuela (where he has born) and Costa Rica. He has been the resident ecologist and tutor at Schumacher College, Dartington, since its inception in 1991. He is also the coordinator of the college’s highly successful MSc in Holistic Science, a degree offered in partnership with the University of Plymouth. He has worked and taught alongside many of the world’s leading ecological activists, thinkers and writers, including Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra, Lynn Margulis, Brian Goodwin and James Lovelock, with whom he has collaborated scientifically for many years. Stephan is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, his first book.
www.schumachercollege.org

Lisa Harrow & Roger Payne - 2005

Roger Payne is a scientist best known for his discovery [with Scott McVay] that humpback whales sing songs. Since 1967, he has studied the behavior of whales, and has led over 100 expeditions to all oceans and studied every species of large whale in the wild. Payne pioneered many of the benign research techniques now used throughout the world to study free-swimming whales, and has trained many current leaders in whale research, both in America and abroad. Payne has published many articles as well as the book, "Among Whales." He has made a number of films and television documentaries and has received seven major awards including two Emmy nominations. Lisa Harrow started her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company playing Olivia in Twelfth Night opposite Judi Dench, and since then has had many starring roles in film, theater and television. Originally from New Zealand, she is the author of an environmental handbook, What Can I Do? An Alphabet for Living, which was published last year by Chelsea Green. In 1997 Lisa moved to Vermont with her husband, whale-biologist Roger Payne, and her son Tim Neill.
www.seachangeinstitute.org

Paul Hawken - 2006, 2009

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and best-selling author. At the age of 20, he became fascinated with the relationship between human and living systems. His concerns extended from health to farming, from commerce to social justice. He started several ecological businesses, writes and teaches about the impact of commerce upon the environment, and consults with governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy.
He is author and co-author of dozens of articles, op-eds, and papers, as well as six books including The Next Economy (1983), Growing a Business (1987), and The Ecology of Commerce (1993).
www.paulhawken.com

Nikki Henderson – 2010

Nikki Henderson is the Executive Director of People's Grocery in West Oakland, CA. Under Nikki's leadership, the organization has launched a new strategic campaign strongly focusing on: revitalizing the economy of West Oakland through all aspects of the food system, from production to distribution, and leveraging the power of local nutrition education and major health institutions to reduce obesity, diabetes, and other major health ailments in West Oakland.
Before People's Grocery, Nikki worked closely with Van Jones and Phaedra Ellis Lamkins at Green for All, fighting for a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. She also worked for Slow Food USA, in Brooklyn, NY where President Josh Viertel came to regard her as an "extraordinary leader with a vision for how food and urban farming can be tools of empowerment". In 2010, Nikki was featured in ELLE Magazine as one of the five Gold Awardees. She has a Master's Degree in African American Studies from UCLA, and is originally from Los Angeles, CA.
www.peoplesgrocery.org

Julia Butterfly Hill – 2005

For 738 days Julia Butterfly Hill lived in the canopy of an ancient redwood tree, called Luna, to help make the world aware of the plight of ancient forests. Her courageous act of civil disobedience gained international attention for the redwoods as well as other environmental and social justice issues and is chronicled in her book The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods. Julia, with the great help of steelworkers and environmentalists, successfully negotiated to permanently protect the 1,000 year-old tree and a nearly three- acre buffer zone. Her two-year vigil informed the public that only 3% of the ancient redwood forests remain and that the Headwaters Forest Agreement, brokered by state and federal agencies and Pacific Lumber/Maxxam Corporation, will not adequately protect forests and species.
www.juliabutterfly.com

Gary Hirshberg – 2008

Gary Hirshberg, husband of Meg Hirshberg and father of three teenage yogurt-eaters, is Chairman, President, and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer, based in Londonderry, New Hampshire. For the past 25 years, Gary has overseen Stonyfield Farm’s phenomenal growth, from its infancy as a seven-cow organic farming school in 1983 to its current $320 million in annual sales. Stonyfield has enjoyed a compounded annual growth rate of over 24% for more than eighteen years by consistently producing great-tasting products and using innovative marketing techniques that blend the company’s social, environmental, and financial missions. Gary joined Stonyfield Farm a few months after its start in 1983. Initially, he directed the Rural Education Center, the small organic farming school from which Stonyfield was spawned. Previously, in addition to serving as a trustee of the farming school, Gary had served as executive director of The New Alchemy Institute – a research and education center dedicated to organic farming, aquaculture, and renewable energy.
Gary has won numerous awards for corporate and environmental leadership, including Global Green USA's “1999 Green Cross Millennium Award for Corporate Environmental Leadership.” He was named "Business Leader of the Year" by Business NH Magazine and "New Hampshire's 1998 Small Business Person of the Year" by the U.S. Small Business Administration.
www.stonyfield.com

John Holdren – 2005

John Holdren is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also the Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. He has been the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981-86), the Tyler Prize for Environment (2000), and the John Heinz Prize for Public Policy (2001), among many other awards. . His work has focused on causes and consequences of global environmental change, analysis of energy technologies and policies, ways to reduce the dangers from nuclear weapons and materia ls. He will talk about the connections between energy and society's priorities regarding the economy, national security, and the environment. He will explore in some detail the science of climate change, the human role in it, and the consequences to be expected.
www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/john-holdren

Van Jones – 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010

Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy. Van is a co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change and Green For All. He is the best-selling author of the definitive book on green jobs: The Green-Collar Economy. He served as the green jobs advisor in the Obama White House in 2009. Van is currently a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress. Additionally, he is a senior policy advisor at Green For All. Van also holds a joint appointment at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
www.americanprogress.org

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – 2007

A graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia School of Law, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a known as a resolute defender of the environment. Kennedy joined the Riverkeeper organization in 1984 and worked with the group to sue alleged polluters of the Hudson River.
He has served as a Clinical Professor of Environmental Law and co-director of the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law. The clinic allows second and third year law students to try cases against Hudson River polluters. Kennedy also serves as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council a lobbying NGO that works to expand environmental regulations and restrict land use.
Hudson Riverkeeper, now part of Kennedy's umbrella organization, Waterkeeper Alliance, was founded in 1966 by a group of Neww York fishermen and citizens. Today there are over 100 Keepers in the US, Canada and Costa Rica.
www.riverkeeper.org

Alan Khazei – 2010

Alan Khazei has pioneered ways to empower citizens to make a difference. In 1987 he co-founded a nonprofit organization called City Year with his friend, Michael Brown. City Year unites young adults ages 17-24 from all backgrounds for an intensive year of full-time community service mentoring, tutoring, and educating children. It served as the model and inspiration for President Clinton’s AmeriCorps program and now operates in 20 U.S. cities and Johannesburg and London.
In June 2003, when AmeriCorps faced a drastic funding cut, Alan joined with other service leaders to organize the “Save AmeriCorps” coalition, an effort that led to an increase of $100 million dollars. Inspired by the success of the Save AmeriCorps campaign, in 2007, Alan launched Be the Change, Inc., a nonprofit that creates national issue based campaigns by organizing coalitions of non-profits, social entrepreneurs, policymakers, private sector leaders, academics, and citizens. In 2009, ServiceNation, the first campaign to be launched from this platform, played a key role in the enactment of the strongly bi-partisan Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.
Alan has served on the boards of leading national non-profits and has received numerous awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Jefferson Award for Public Service, and the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award. In 2006, US News and World Report named him one of America's “25 Best Leaders.” Alan is also the author of a new book, Big Citizenship: How pragmatic idealism can bring out the best in America, which will come out at the end of August. Alan lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, Vanessa Kirsch, and their two children.

James Howard Kunstler – 2005

James Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." His new book, "The Long Emergency," describes the dramatic changes that an oil-dependent American society faces in the 21st century.
www.kunstler.com

Winona LaDuke – 2009

Winona LaDuke is a Native American activist and an environmentalist. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for election to the office of Vice President of the United States as the nominee of the United States Green Party.
LaDuke is the daughter of an Anishinabeg (Ojibwe) ("Chippewa") father and Jewish mother who worked as an art professor. She was raised on the west coast of the United States, but after graduating from Harvard in 1982 with a degree in native economic development, she accepted a job as principal of the high school of the White Earth Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. She soon became an activist, involved in the struggle to recover lands promised to the Ojibwe by a 1867 treaty. She helped the Ojibwe buy back thousands of acres of ancestral land.
LaDuke was named Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine in 1997 and won the Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998. She is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, the Indigenous Women's Network, and the Honor the Earth Fund.
LaDuke is the author of the novel, Last Standing Woman, and the non-fiction book, All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life.
In the 2004 primary elections, LaDuke endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.
www.nativeharvest.com

Anna Lappe' - 2005

Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author and sought-after public speaker, respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization, and social change. Named one of Time’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna has been featured in The New York Times, Gourmet, O: The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body + Soul, Natural Health, and Vibe, among many other publications.
In her latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It (Bloomsbury, March 2010), Anna deftly explains the links between today’s global food system and climate change, and offers ideas and inspiration for making sustainable food choices that can provide a catalyst for transforming the environment. Booklist calls it “impeccable, informative and inspiring.”
Anna is a founding principal, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, of the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education about the root causes of hunger and poverty. The Lappés are also co-founders of the Small Planet Fund, which has raised and given away nearly half a million dollars to democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding in 2002.
www.smallplanet.org

John Lash – 2005, 2006

John Lash, co-founder and principal author of Metahistory Quest , is one of the foremost exponents of the power of myth to direct and shape not only the life of an individual but history itself. Described as the true successor of Mircea Eliade, John is a lifelong student of world mythology, Tantra, the pre-Christian Mysteries, alchemy, and naked-eye astronomy. His published works include The Seeker’s Handbook: The Complete Guide to Spiritual Pathfinding, Twins and the Double, The Hero - Manhood and Power and Quest for the Zodiac. John has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. Lash will speak about our beliefs regarding Gaia and the role of humanity in "healing the planet."
www.metahistory.org

Annie Leonard – 2010

Annie Leonard is the author and host of The Story of Stuff video. She is author of The Story of Stuff, the book, published by Free Press of Simon and Schuster on March 9, 2010.
Annie has spent nearly two decades investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues. She has traveled to 40 countries, visiting literally hundreds of factories where our stuff is made and dumps where our stuff is dumped. Witnessing first hand the horrendous impacts of both over- and under- consumption around the world, Annie is fiercely dedicated to reclaiming and transforming our industrial and economic systems so they serve, rather than undermine, ecological sustainability and social equity.

Annie is currently the Director of The Story of Stuff Project. Prior to this, most recently, Annie coordinated the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, a funder collaborative seeking to address the hidden environmental and social impacts of current systems of making, using and throwing away all the stuff of daily life.

She has also worked with GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), Health Care Without Harm, Essential Action and Greenpeace International.

Annie is currently on the boards of International Forum for Globalization and GAIA and has previously served on the Boards of the Grassroots Recycling Network, the Environmental Health Fund, Global Greengrants India and Greenpeace India. She did her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and graduate work in City and Regional Planning at Cornell, both in New York. She is currently based in the Bay Area, California.
www.storyofstuff.com

Khepe-ra Maat-Het-Heru - 2009

Born Heather Khara Rebeiro has been inspired since early childhood by one simple thing, the magic of transformative collective action. For the last fifteen years she has fostered this belief in various ways at every level, from volunteer to board member to state commissioner to national/international council member/chair, and in the capacity of professional educator. She uses the power of word and by the age of twenty she had co-authored, “Get Up, Act Up, and Shape Up the World” (published by The Points of Light Foundation), directed community theater, and started public speaking/singing nationally. She is the visionary founder of The ESHU2 Collective (Education Should Help US x Ecology, Spirituality, Health, and Unity) whose crowning achievement was diversifying YouthBuild USA’s consultant pool by age, race, and class through the creation of the national graduate facilitator training program. She has touched the lives of thousands upon thousands with organizations such as NeighborWorks America and the government of Bermuda. She specializes in youth/adult leadership partnerships, diversity healing and dealing, nourishing spirituality and cultivating environmental respect. As the initiator of The Spiritual Warrior Society, (ages six and up), she helps people find their spiritual tools at the Spiritual Exploratory Center. She invented and facilitated the idea and creation of “The Sacred Green Space”, a multi-functional environmentally respectful blessed community gathering space that hopes to soon be the site for the city of New Bedford’s first monument to acknowledge the atrocities of African slavery and the genocide of the original people of the Americas.

Lynn Margulis – 2005, 2006

Lynn Margulis is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, received from William J. Clinton the Presidential Medal of Science in 1999. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., announced in 1998 that it will permanently archive her papers. She was a faculty mentor at Boston University for 22 years.
Her publications, spanning a wide range of scientific topics, include original contributions to cell biology and microbial evolution. She is best known for her theory of symbiogene sis, which challenges a central tenet of neodarwinism. She argues that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations. Rather new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers. The fusion of genomes in symbioses followed by natural selection, she suggests, leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality. Dr. Margulis is also acknowledged for her contribution to James E. Lovelock’s Gaia concept. Gaia theory posits that the Earth’s surface interactions among living beings sediment, air, and water have created a vast self-regulating system.
www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/margulis/

James J. McCarthy - 2006

James McCarthy is Harvard's Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography. He holds faculty appointments in Biology and Earth & Planetary Sciences, and he oversees the undergraduate major in Environmental Science and Public Policy. He is also the Master of Harvard's Pforzheimer House. McCarthy received his undergraduate degree in biology from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and his Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. His research interests relate to marine plankton and climate. He has served on and led many national and international groups charged to plan and implement studies on global change. Recently he headed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], Working Group II, which had responsibilities for assessing impacts of current and future global climate change. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/mccarthy/mccarthy-oeb.htm

Bill McKibben - 2007

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming and alternative energy and advocates for more localized economies. In 2010 the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" and Time magazine described him as "the world's best green journalist. In 2009 he led the organization of 350.org , which coordinated what Foreign Policy magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind," with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009.
www.billmckibben.com

Nipun Mehta – 2009

Nipun Mehta is the founder of CharityFocus, a fully volunteer driven organization started in 1999 to inspire young IT professionals to provide free web based solutions for nonprofit organizations worldwide. Having served thousands of nonprofits, CharityFocus has now grown into an incubator of "gift-economy" projects ranging from web services to a film production company to a print magazine to a restaurant. With a membership base of 260 thousand, they attract millions of global viewers to its websites; still, being organized without organizational overhead, CharityFocus maintains steadfast focus delivering value that can’t always be counted.
In high-school, Nipun’s goal was to either become a tennis-pro or a Himalayan Yogi. By his third year at UC Berkeley, though, he started his software career in the Silicon Valley. Dissatisfied by the dot-com greed of the late 90s, Nipun went to a homeless shelter with three friends to "give with no strings attached." They ended up creating a website, and also an organization named CharityFocus. In 2005, Nipun and Guri, his wife of six months, embarked on an unscripted walking pilgrimage in India, eating whatever food was offered and sleeping wherever a flat surface is found; that walk radically deepened their experience of generosity.
Today, Nipun's mission statement in life reads: "Bring smiles in the world and stillness in my heart."   
www.charityfocus.org

Greg Mortenson – 2010

Greg Mortenson is the co-founder of nonprofit Central Asia Institute www.ikat.org, founder of Pennies For Peace www.penniesforpeace.org, co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea www.threecupsoftea.com, and author of bestseller Stones into Schools www.stonesintoschools.com. In 2009, Mortenson received Pakistan’s highest civil award, Sitara-e-Pakistan (“Star of Pakistan”) for his dedicated and humanitarian effort to promote education and literacy in rural areas for fifteen years. Several bi-partisan U.S. Congressional representatives nominated Mortenson for the Nobel Peace Prize in both 2008 and 2009. The award recipient is chosen by a secret process and announced in October the following year.
www.ikat.org

Dr. Joia Mukherjee - 2007

Dr. Joia Mukherjee trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and has an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Joia has been involved in health care access and human rights issues since 1989 in the United States, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Since 1999, Joia has served as the Medical Director of Partners In Health, an international medical charity with clinical programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, Mexico, Russia, and inner-city Boston. Dr. Mukherjee consults for the World Health Organization on the treatment of HIV and MDR-TB in developing countries and is a member of the Executive Board of Health Action AIDS, a campaign conducted with Physicians for Human Rights to engage the US health professional community in the international advocacy and education effort to stop the global AIDS pandemic.
In rural Haiti, Dr. Mukherjee along with colleagues Drs. Paul Farmer and Fernet Leandre has established a program to treat patients with HIV infection using highly active antiretroviral therapy. This program, the HIV Equity Initiative, was the first of its kind in a developing country and served as a model for the Millennium Development Goals, the WHO’s 3 by 5 initiative, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Dr. Mukherjee is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School where she teaches Social Medicine and Infectious Disease to medical students, residents and fellows.
ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/people/faculty/mukherjee

Jeremy Narby – 2006

An anthropologist, who works with indigenous Amazonians to preserve their rainforests and systems of knowledge, finds common ground with contemporary biology. If nature is intelligent, and humans are part of nature, what does nature have in mind with us?
Narby is an anthropologist and author. He has worked for 22 years with the indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon for the recognition of their territories and systems of knowledge. He is the author of several books, including The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge and Intelligence in Nature. Since 1989, he has been working for Swiss NGO Nouvelle Planète as Amazonian projects coordinator.
www.marioninstitute.org/serendipity/nouvelle-planete

Adeola A. Oredola – 2010

Adeola A. Oredola is the Executive Director at Youth In Action, a 12 year old non-profit in Providence where over 1,000 young leaders have been at the forefront of creating positive social change throughout their city. Adeola grew up Providence, attended Providence Public Schools, then Brown University, and now lives in the Washington Park area of the city. As a product of the community in which she works, Adeola is truly dedicated to every aspect of youth and community development in Providence. In 2006, she completed a three year term as a member of the Providence School Board through which she worked to ensure that both youth and the community have stronger voices in policy and school improvement initiatives. She currently serves as a Board Member with AS220, the Women’s Fund of RI, and the Providence Plan.
www.youthinactionri.org

David Orr - 2008

David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. His career as a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, and entrepreneur spans fields as diverse as environment and politics, environmental education, campus greening, green building, ecological design, and climate change. In 1996 he organized the effort to design the first substantially green building on a U.S. college campus. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center was later named by the U.S. Department of Energy as “One of Thirty Milestone Buildings in the 20th Century,” and by The New York Times as the most interesting of a new generation of college and university buildings. The Lewis Center purifies all of its wastewater and is the first college building in the U.S. powered entirely by sunlight. But most important it became a laboratory in sustainability that is training some of the nation’s brightest and most dedicated students for careers in solving environmental problems. The story of that building is told in two books, The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002) that Fritjof Capra called “brilliant,” and a second, Design on the Edge (MIT, 2006), that architect Sim van der Ryn describes as “powerful and inspiring.”
www.davidworr.com

Riki Ott – 2010

Riki Ott, PhD, is a trained marine toxicologist, author, and former commercial fisherma'm who was on the scene during the Exxon Valdez oil spill. For 21 years, she has been the voice and face of efforts for justice: Ott has written two books on oil spill impacts to ecosystems, people, and communities (Sound Truth and Corporate Myths; Not One Drop) and starred in Black Wave, an award-winning feature film. In 2010, Ott brought her expertise to the Gulf, volunteering 5 months to expose BP’s cover-up attempts, including public health problems, and to empower local residents to take action. She co-founded Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute and a member of the national grassroots coalition MoveToAmend.org, and is calling to amend the Constitution to abolish corporate personhood. In October, Ott received Huffington Post’s Game Changer 2010 Award.
www.movetoamend.org

Juan Pacheco – 2009

Mr. Pacheco works as community Liaison for World Vision’s Community Mobilization Initiative (CMI). His role in World Vision helped the CMI Program attain the title of “Best Practices in Gang Prevention Program” highlighted in the study “Dare to Care - Community-Based Responses to Youth Gang Violence in Central America and Central American Immigrant Communities in the United States”. “Though CMI is a relatively young program, its staffers have managed to reach out to a significant portion of the youth in their community. They have accomplished this by pro-actively reaching out to families, schools, police and other existing institutions to provide support for at-risk youth. Their dedication and willingness to coordinate among these various groups has had a positive impact on the community and has complemented the programs they run which provide youth with concrete alternatives to joining gangs”.
Mr. Pacheco also currently Volunteers as the East coast Representative for Barrios Unidos, a youth violence prevention/intervention and community awareness organization. The uniqueness of Barrios Unidos, lies in its transformational approach. Barrios Unidos offers hope by teaching youth positive resiliency and by utilizing adults and older youth who have themselves experienced and overcome the challenges young people face. Barrios Unidos believes that drawing upon the resources of adults and older youth that have made it out of the "street life" assist youth in choosing life-affirming behavior, positive self-esteem, constructive goals, supportive community, and cultural pride. Mr. Pacheco provides many motivational speeches and presentations, as well as running educational and recreational youth groups. He co-founded the Kids Club/Computer Lab program, in addition to organizing many community activities.

Billy Parish - 2006

At the end of 2002, freaked out about the deepening climate crisis, Billy dropped out of Yale University in the middle of his junior year to build a youth movement. He co-founded and led the Energy Action Coalition, which has become the largest youth advocacy organization in the world working on clean energy and global warming issues. Billy and the coalition have brought together 50 diverse organizations, raised over $10 million in four years, helped get over 650 colleges to commit to climate neutrality, trained and empowered tens of thousands of young people, and built a base of 340,000 young voters who elevated climate issues in the 2008 elections. In March 2009, the Energy Action Coalition organized Power Shift ’09, which brought over 12,000 young people to Washington D.C. for the largest climate-focused training, lobby day and non-violent civil disobedience action in U.S. history.
Since early 2008, Billy has expanded his work beyond the Energy Action Coalition into a focus on building the green economy and creating green jobs for young people. He has been a consultant for Green for All on their “Green Jobs Now” day of action and developed the idea and campaign to create a Clean Energy Corps, a proposal based on the Civilian Conservation Corps designed to rebuild the country and create millions of new jobs and opportunities for community service. The community service component, The Clean Energy Service Corps, has become law as part of the Serve America Act, and other components of the proposal have been incorporated into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the American Clean Energy and Security Act.
billyparish.com

Gunter Pauli – 2005, 2006

Gunter Pauli is a world-renowned sustainability educator whose entrepreneurial activities span business, culture, science, politics and the environment. He is dedicated to designing and implementing a society and industries that respond to people‚s needs using what is available from nature. Pauli is the founder and director of ZERI [Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives] a network of 3,000 scientists focusing on creative solutions for pressing problems and the redesign of production and consumption into clusters of industries. Pauli is currently designing a science-based curriculum composed of 36 fables, which illustrate the ZERI principles. Pauli was keynote speaker at the launch of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and is the author of Upsizing: The Road to Zero Emissions, More Jobs, More Income, and No Pollution and Out of the Box: ZERI Management Stories.
www.zeri.org

John Perkins – 2007, 2008

John Perkins's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which spent nearly a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller lists and has been published in more than 25 languages, is a startling exposé of international corruption. His new book, The Secret History of the American Empire, also a New York Times bestseller, details the clandestine operations that created the world's first truly global empire and provides a compassionate plan for turning this around, for crafting a world that future generations will be proud to inherit.
John is a founder and board member of Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance, nonprofit organizations devoted to creating a stable, sustainable, and peaceful world. John's courage in writing these books and speaking out against his former bosses exemplifies the courage shown by our Founding Fathers and Mothers when they stood up to the British Empire. Like them, John defied threats and bribes and took action. His courage serves as an example for all of us. As he proclaims at the end of Secret History, "Now is the time for us to change the world."
www.johnperkins.org

Dr. Thomas Rau, MD - 2008

Dr. Thomas Rau, MD attended medical school at Berne University and also passed the final medical examinations in the USA. From 1981 to 1992, Dr. Rau was the Medical Director of a Swiss clinic for rheumatology and rehabilitation medicine. He then trained in homeopathy and many natural therapies. Dr. Rau teaches naturopathic healing methods, dietary, neural and isopathic therapies. Since 1992, Dr. Rau has served as medical director and part owner of the Paracelsus Klinik, Center for Biological Medicine and Dentistry in Lustmuhle, Switzerland. A first of its kind in Switzerland, the Paracelsus Klinik is widely recognized as a center of excellence for natural medicine. It has grown into a dynamic team of eighty highly committed people. This includes eight doctors, three dentists, natural health practitioners, nurses and other staff. Absolutely unique to Paracelsus is the integration of a biological dentistry practice and an on site dental clinic. He is also considered a leading expert in Enderlein therapy, Darkfield Microscopy and Biologic tumor treatments. He is a Co-Founder of the Biological Medicine Network in the USA. Dr. Rau’s articles are widely published and he lectures internationally, his new book The Swiss Secret to Optimal Health, including his diet for whole body healing, has recently been published by Berkely Books.
www.drrausway.com

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris – 2009

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is an American/Greek evolution biologist, futurist, author and speaker, living in Spain. With a post-doc at the American Museum of Natural History, she taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts, contributed to the NOVA-Horizon TV series, is a fellow of the World Business Academy and a member of the World Wisdom Council. Her venues include The World Bank, UN, Boeing, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, S. African Rand Bank, Caux Round Table, Tokyo International Forum, Australian, NewZealand and Netherlands Govts, Sao Paulo business schools and State of the World Forums. Author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution; A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us and Biology Revisioned w. Willis Harman. www.sahtouris.com
www.sahtouris.com

Juliet Schor - 2005

Juliet Schor’s research over the last ten years has focussed on issues pertaining to trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic justice. Schor's latest book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner 2004). She is also author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer. She has co-edited, The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, The Consumer Society Reader, and Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century. Earlier in her career, her research focussed on issues of wages, productivity, and profitability. She also did work on the political economy of central banking. Schor is currently is at work on a project on the commercialization of childhood, and is beginning research on environmental sustainability and its relation to Americans’ lifestyles.
Schor is a board member and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, an organization devoted to transforming North American lifestyles to make them more ecologically and socially sustainable. She also teaches periodically at Schumacher College, an International Center for Ecological Studies based in south-west England.
www2.bc.edu/~schorj/

Simran Sethi

Simran Sethi - 2007Simran Sethi is an award-winning journalist who reports on issues of economic sustainability, environmental stewardship and social justice. She is the contributing author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, the companion guide to the PBS series Ethical Markets, the first national television series on sustainable business.
Simran is the host/ writer of Sundance Channel's environmental programming The Green and is a featured commentator and story consultant for Sundance's original series Big Ideas for a Small Planet. She blogs and hosts a weekly environmental podcast.for TreeHugger.com – the largest environmental website on the internet. Under her management, TreeHugger won the 2006 Vloggie for Best Green Vlog.
Lauded in Vanity Fair's green issue as the environmental "messenger," Simran has contributed environmental segments to the Oprah Winfrey Show and has been featured on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and Martha Stewart Show highlighting ways citizens can become more environmentally-friendly. She is the featured eco-expert on the syndicated green home makeover show The EcoZone Project and is the host of Voom HD Network's social and environmental series Keep It Green on Equator HD.
Simran produced and anchored the news for MTV Asia, created and oversaw the MTV India news division, and developed programming for the BBC through her own production company SHE TV. She holds an MBA in sustainable management from the Presidio School of Management and graduated cum laude with a BA in Sociology and Women's Studies from Smith College.
simransethi.com

Dr. Vandana Shiva – 2009

Dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a Physicist and did her Ph.D. on the subject “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory” from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India
Dr. Shiva is one of the world’s most renowned environmentalist. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Dr. Shiva has pioneered the organic movement in India and established Navdanya, the country’s biggest network of seed keepers and organic producers. Dr. Shiva has authored many books including Soil Not Oil, Earth Democracy, Stolen Harvest, Staying Alive, Water Wars and Biopiracy. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, Global 500 Award of UN and Earth Day International Award. Lennon ONO grant for peace award by Yoko Ono and Honourable Mayor of Reykjavik. Dr. Shiva also serves on the boards of many organizations including World Future Council, International Forum on Globalisation and Slow Food International.
www.navdanya.org

Nina Simons - 2008

Nina Simons co-founded the nonprofit Bioneers and currently serves as co-president with her partner and husband, Kenny Ausubel. A social entrepreneur, Nina’s work to advance social change is guided by her efforts to restore gender balance and diversity, and by her reverence for whole systems and the mystery of the natural world, transformational arts and learning. Previous to co-founding Bioneers in 1990, Nina served as president of Seeds of Change and as director of strategic marketing for Odwalla, where she helped them each to achieve national prominence rapidly through creative, community based and innovative approaches to communications and marketing. Together with Kenny Ausubel, Nina has developed effective outreach and media strategies for spreading the positive solutions and stories of the Bioneers community of ecological and social innovators. They have collaborated to grow the organization and its influence, which now reaches many millions through its annual conferences, satellite conference partners, award-winning radio series, broadcast and print media, interactive website and book series. In addition to advancing practical social and environmental strategies, Nina has an enduring interest in the leadership of women and girls, which has long been reflected in Bioneers’ conference programming and media.
www.bioneers.org

Woody Tasch – 2009

Woody Tasch is Chairman and President of Slow Money, a 501 c 3 formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and to promote new principles of fiduciary responsibility to support sustainable agriculture and the emergence of a restorative economy. For ten years, through 2008, Tasch was Chairman of Investors' Circle, a network of angel investors, family offices, and social purpose funds and foundations that has invested $133 million in 200 early stage sustainability-promoting ventures and venture funds, since 1992. During much of the 1990s, Woody was Treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, where, as part of an innovative mission-related venture capital investing program, a substantial investment was made in Stonyfield Farm, now the world’s largest maker of organic yogurt. Woody has worked as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, board member and consultant with such organizations as Prince Ventures (a healthcare venture fund), Healthdata International, CERES (the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies), National Mentor, Greenway, the Nantucket Education Trust, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) and The Farmers Diner. Woody's involvement in food dates back to 1979, when he developed a case study program at The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (home of Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat and the "green revolution"); he co-authored Food Production and Public Policy in Developing Countries (Praeger Special Studies). He has been founding Chairman of several NGOs: the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance (supporting over 100 small-scale venture funds that target economically disadvantaged regions), Sustainable Nantucket (environmentally responsible growth management on Nantucket Island) and the Nantucket Education Trust (affordable housing for teachers). Articles, interviews or profiles have appeared in Ode, Hemisphere, Green Money Journal, Amherst Alumni Magazine, Resurgence, Andover Review, Utne Reader, More Than Money, Il Sole-24 Ore (Italian financial press), Steering Business Towards Sustainability (United Nations University Press), WBUR and Conscious Talk Radio. He is a frequent speaker at various socially responsible business and sustainable agriculture venues, including Social Venture Network, SRI in the Rockies and Terra Madre. He is the author of the recently published Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Woody graduated Magna Cum Laude from Amherst College in 1973.
www.slowmoney.org

Jonathan Todd - 2005

Dr. Todd is one of the pioneers in the emerging field of ecological design and engineering and the founder and senior partner of John Todd Ecological Design.
Beyond his numerous awards and citations including the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Award, Dr. Todd has degrees in agriculture, parasitology & tropical medicine from McGill University and a doctorate in fisheries and ethology from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Todd is currently a tenured research professor at the School of Natural Resources and both a Distinguished Lecturer and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
He is also the founder and president of Ocean Arks International, a non- profit research and education organization established in 1981.
toddecological.com

Lynne Twist - 2008

Lynne Twist -- a global activist, fundraiser, speaker, consultant, and author -- has dedicated her life to global initiatives that serve the best instincts in all of us. She has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and trained thousands of fundraisers to be more effective in their work. Lynne has spent more than three decades working in positions of leadership with many global initiatives including: ending world hunger, protecting the world's rainforests, empowering indigenous peoples, improving health, economic, and political conditions for women and children, advancing the scientific understanding of human consciousness, creating a sustainable future for all life. The compelling stories and insights gained from her experiences inspire Lynne's keynotes and workshops, and are the foundation for her best selling, award winning book The Soul of Money. <http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0393050971/ref=nosim/thesoulofmone-20> Lynne founded the Soul of Money Institute to express her commitment to supporting and empowering people in finding peace and sufficiency in their relationship with money and the money culture.
www.soulofmoney.org

Dennis Whittle & Mari Kuraishi - 2005

Dennis Whittle is the co-founder of GlobalGiving. Before joining the World Bank in 1986, Dennis worked in the Philippines with the Asian Development Bank and with USAID. Until October 2000, Dennis was part of a troika that led the World Bank's Corporate Strategy and Innovation units. From 1992-1997, he led a variety of initiatives in the Bank's Russia program, including housing reform and energy efficiency projects. From 1987-1992, Dennis was an economist in the World Bank's Jakarta office advising the Indonesian Ministries of Finance and National Development, and managing projects in the agriculture and forestry sectors. Dennis graduated with honors in religious studies from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and did his graduate work in development studies and economics at Princeton University. Dennis also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
Mari heads up the internal operations of GlobalGiving, which she co-founded with Dennis Whittle. Before GlobalGiving, she worked at the World Bank where she managed and created some of the Bank's most innovative projects including the first ever Innovation and Development Marketplaces, and the first series of strategic forums with the World Bank's president and senior management. Mari also designed a range of investment projects in the Russia reform program, including a residential energy efficiency project, structural adjustment loans, and legal reform project. In addition to her native Japanese, Mari also speaks Russian, Italian, and French. She has an undergraduate degree in history from Harvard University and did graduate work in Russian and Japanese history and politics at Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Mari also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
www.globalgiving.org

Diane Wilson – 2007, 2010

Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, began fishing the bays off the Gulf Coast of Texas at the age of eight. By 24 she was a boat captain. In 1989, while running her brother's fish house at the docks and mending nets, she read a newspaper article that listed her home of Calhoun County as the number one toxic polluter in the country. She set up a meeting in the town hall to discuss what the chemical plants were doing to the bays and thus began her life as an environmental activist. Threatened by thugs and despised by her neighbors, Diane insisted the truth be told and that Formosa Plastics stop dumping toxins into the bay.
Her work on behalf of the people and aquatic life of Seadrift, Texas, has won her a number of awards including: National Fisherman Magazine Award, Mother Jones's Hell Raiser of the Month, Lois Gibbs' Environmental Lifetime Award, Louisiana Environmental Action (LEAN) Environmental Award, Giraffe Project, Jenifer Altman Award, and the Bioneers Award. She is a founding member of CODEPINK and continues to lead the fight for social justice.
www.codepink4peace.org

Susan Witt - 2005

Susan Witt was the Executive Director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, the predecessor of the New Economics Institute. She helped found the Society in 1980 and led the development of its highly regarded publication, library, seminar, and other educational programs while at the same time remaining deeply committed to implementing Schumacher’s economic ideas in her home region of the Berkshires.
She helped found the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires in 1980 and has been responsible for many of the innovative financing and contracting methods that the Land Trust uses to create more affordable access to land. In 2006 she co-founded the BerkShares local currency program that has won unprecedented international media attention as a model for other regions. She created and administered the SHARE micro-credit program, the precursor of BerkShares, and in 1985 helped Robyn Van En form the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in the United States at Indian Line Farm. Susan Witt writes and speaks on the theory and practice of building sustainable local economies.
neweconomicsinstitute.org

Naomi Wolf - 2007

Naomi Wolf is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Beauty Myth, The End of America and Give Me Liberty. She has toured the world speaking to audiences of all walks of life about gender equality, social justice, and, most recently, the defense of liberty in America and internationally. She is the cofounder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which teaches ethics and empowerment to young women leaders, and is also a cofounder of the American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.
naomiwolf.org