Friday:
Jay Harman (www.paxscientific.com) is a naturalist, entrepreneur, award-winning inventor, and author of numerous patents in lightweight, high efficiency marine craft design and in friction-reduction technologies. CEO of PAX Scientific, a Marin county engineering R&D firm that uses streamlining geometries and biomimetic approaches to design energy efficient, quiet, and ecologically friendly technology, Harman is also on the boards of PAX Water Technologies (water and wastewater treatment solutions) and PAX Mixer (mixer technology for a variety of industries, including fermentation, food manufacture, and energy production).
Judith F. Baca (www.sparcmurals.org), a world-renowned painter and muralist, community arts pioneer, scholar and educator, has been teaching art in the UC system (including at UCLA) for 20 years. She was the founder of the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the now legendary 30-year community arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in 1976. She continues to serves as SPARC's artistic director and focuses her artistic energy in the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital/Mural Lab.
Judy Wicks (www.whitedogcafe.com), owner/founder of Philadelphia's 24-year-old White Dog Cafe, is a national leader in the local, living economies movement. Co-founder/co-chair of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, and president of White Dog Community Enterprises (a nonprofit dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region), Judy has won numerous awards, including the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year and the Living Economy Award from Business Ethics Magazine.
John Abrams (www.somoco.com) is the cofounder and CEO of South Mountain Company, a 32-year-old employee owned design/build and renewable energy company on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (winner of Business Ethics magazine's 2005 National Award for Workplace Democracy). John is the author of The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place and roams far and near to speak and teach about Good Business. Close to home, he concentrates on re-localizing the economy, solving the affordable housing crisis, and inventing a positive future.
Van Jones (www.ellabakercenter.org), an activist working to combine solutions to social inequality and environmental destruction, founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which promotes alternatives to violence and incarceration, in 1996. He has won many honors including a Reebok Human Rights Award and an Ashoka Fellowship, and has served on the boards of many groups, including: the National Apollo Alliance, Social Ventures Network, Rainforest Action Network and Bioneers. The City of Oakland has adopted the Ella Baker Center's "Green Jobs Corps" proposal, and Van is pushing to create the first-ever Green Enterprise Zone in Oakland.
Saturday:
Paul T. Anastas, Ph.D., widely considered the founder of "green chemistry" during his work for the U.S. EPA and as director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program, is a professor at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and also serves as the director of Yale's Center for Green Chemistry. Formerly director of the Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, D.C. and assistant director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Anastas has published widely, including the books Benign by Design, Designing Safer Polymers, and the seminal Green Chemistry (as co-author). He has won countless prestigious awards, serves on numerous boards, and is a Special Professor in several universities around the world.
Majora Carter (www.ssbx.org), born, raised, and residing and working in the Hunts Point section of New York's Bronx, has long fought to improve the quality of life in her environmentally challenged community. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001, and has had remarkable success, creating riverfront parks, fighting to demolish underused expressways, implementing environmental stewardship training programs, and pushing for a major project, the South Bronx Greenway (now under construction), securing over $20M in funding. Majora's vision, drive and tenacity earned her national recognition as a major figure in the Environmental Justice movement and a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship.
Evon Peter, the chairman of Native Movement and former chief of the Neetsaii Gwich'in from Arctic Village in northeastern Alaska, has served as the co-chair of the Gwich'in Council International and on the executive board of the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council. Evon is an advocate of Indigenous Peoples' rights, youth activism and a balanced world, and is active as a speaker, strategist, writer, and organizer. His experience includes work with United Nations and Arctic Council forums representing Indigenous and environmental interests. He is also featured in the 2005 award-winning feature film "Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action."
Eve Ensler (www.vday.org), an award-winning playwright, performer and activist, is the author of The Vagina Monologues (translated into 45 languages and performed in over 112 countries). Eve's other plays include Necessary Targets, Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, The Good Body, and most recently The Treatment. Eve is the founder/artistic director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over 40 million dollars in 8 years, and is also the author of Insecure At Last: Losing It in A Security Obsessed World.
Edward Tick, Ph.D. (www.mentorthesoul.com), has been working with survivors of war, violence and trauma for over 30 years. He is founder and director of Soldier's Heart: A Veterans' Safe Return Initiative and guides educational, healing and reconciliation projects nationally and internationally. Ed is author of Sacred Mountain: Encounters with the Vietnam Beast, The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine, The Golden Tortoise: Viet Nam Journeys and War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
Sunday:
Wallace J. Nichols, Ph.D. (www.wallacejnichols.org) is a scientist, ocean activist, author and a dad. He's senior scientist at the Ocean Conservancy and a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. He works with many non-profit organizations, youth, fishermen and researchers around the world to build an Ocean Revolution. He's especially fond of sea turtles.
Carol Bebelle (a.k.a. Akua Wambui) (www.ashecac.org), a life-long New Orleanian, spent 20 years in the public sector as an administrator/planner of education, social and health programs, then became an innovative private consultant to non-profits stressing the pivotal influence of culture and creativity in community development. A writer, poet and producer of many art and performance projects, she co-founded (with artist Douglas Redd) Efforts of Grace, Inc., a non-profit community cultural art organization, which runs the Ashe' Cultural Arts Center on historic Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, dedicated to the saving and re-development of New Orleans' rich cultural, creative and community legacy.
Charlotte Brody (www.commonweal.org) is the executive director of Commonweal, a Bolinas, California based organization that works on health and environmental issues. She was a founder and executive director of the Health Care Without Harm Campaign, the organizing director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the executive director of a Planned Parenthood affiliate in North Carolina and coordinator of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an occupational safety and health organization focused on cotton textile workers. A registered nurse and mother of two, she has been an activist and an organizer since 1964.
Winona LaDuke, from the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, is a two time Green Party U.S. vice-presidential candidate, the mother of five, and program director of Honor the Earth, a Native American foundation working on environmental and energy issues. Founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Winona has worked for over 20 years on indigenous land issues and is the recipient of a wide array of prestigious awards, including, most recently, the International Slow Food Award. She has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues and is the author of five books, including: Last Standing Woman, All Our Relations, and most recently, Recovering the Sacred.
Ka Hsaw Wa, (www.earthrights.org) co-founder and executive director of EarthRights International (ERI) and a member of the Karen ethnic nationality, was one of the student leaders in the 1988 Burmese student democracy uprising and has been a human rights activist ever since, working to document and resist human rights and environmental abuses within Burma (and around the world). Ka Hsaw Wa has been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, Reebok Human Rights Award, Whitley Fund for Nature/Sting and Trudie Styler Award for Human Rights and the Environment, and the Conde Nast Environmental Award.
Katharine Redford, Esq., (www.earthrights.org) co-founder and U.S. office director of EarthRights International (ERI), received the Robert Kennedy Award for Human Rights and Public Service at Virginia Law School and served as counsel to plaintiffs in ERI's landmark case, Doe v. Unocal. In addition to working on ERI's litigation and teaching at the EarthRights Schools, Katie currently serves as an adjunct professor of law at both Virginia and American University and has published widely on human rights and corporate accountability. Katie is a 2006 Ashoka Global Fellow.
