We are very pleased to announce the following keynote speakers for Bioneers by the Bay 2008. Please check back for updates.

Friday, Oct. 24


David Orr
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.”


Majora Carter
Dr. Majora Carter simultaneously addresses public health, poverty alleviation, and climate change as one of the nation’s pioneers in successful green-collar job training and placement systems. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 to achieve environmental justice through economically sustainable projects informed by community needs. Her work has been noted in numerous books; celebrated with awards from the National Audubon Society, the EPA, the NRDC, and the AIA among many others. She is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, one of Essence Magazine’s 25 Most Influential African-Americans in 2007, and one of the NY Post’s Most Influential NYC Women for the past two years. This year, her mission extends to include other cities, foundations, universities, businesses, and communities across around the world on how to unlock their green-collar economic potential to benefit all everyone.


Gary Hirshberg
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



Saturday, Oct. 25


Rha Goddess
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


Dr. Thomas Rau, MD
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.pbmn.org


Eliot Coleman
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


Kenny Ausubel
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



Sunday, Oct. 26

John Abrams
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



Lynne Twist
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. 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


John Perkins
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
www.dreamchange.org


Nina Simons
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