People Types: Speaker

Fay Bennett held posts at the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF) from 1952 through 1974, directing attention to rural poverty, and was a seasoned veteran of many struggles for social justice in the South. NSF was a nonprofit advocacy organization created in 1937 to publicize the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers and to push for … Continued

Sachem HawkStorm is the chief of the Schaghticoke First Nations and a direct descendant of the great Wampanoag Chief Wasanegin Massasoit. Schaghticoke First Nations is one of three nations of the Schaghticoke Tribe, with 370 members, and also a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. The word “Schaghticoke” means “the Mingling of Waters,” and signifies the merging of what … Continued

Gopal Dayaneni is a member of the staff collective at the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. He is an active trainer with and serves on the boards of The Ruckus Society and the Center for Story-based Strategy. He also serves on the advisory boards of the International Accountability Project and the Catalyst Project. Gopal … Continued

Karissa Lewis is the Executive Director of the Center for Third World Organizing. With extensive experience in organizing and activist training, she works to build leadership in communities of color and is dedicated to creating a movement for social justice that is led by the people most affected. She has organized around issues ranging from gentrification … Continued

Stewart Wallis is currently Chair of WEAll, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (www.wellbeingeconomy.org). WEAll is the leading global collaboration of organisations, alliances, movements and individuals working together to transform the economic system into one that delivers human and ecological wellbeing. Previously he was  Executive Director of NEF -the New Economics Foundation (the UK’s leading think tank … Continued

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician, and economist in Britain. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralized, and appropriate technologies. E. F. Schumacher was born in Germany in 1911. … Continued

John McClaughry is President of the Institute for Liberty and Community in Concord, Vermont; He was a Founder, board member and for 12 years chairman of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and former member of the Vermont House of Representatives and Vermont State Senate. John is the curator of the Decentralism File, a … Continued

Oren Lyons is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a Chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee. He was a founding member in 1977 of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth. This council of respected Indian leaders meets annually to … Continued

James Gustave (Gus) Speth served on the faculty of the Vermont Law School as Professor of Law from 2010 to 2015. He now serves as a Fellow at the Tellus Institute, The Democracy Collaborative, and the Vermont Law School. He is Co-Chair of the Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative. In 2009 he completed … Continued

Will Raap serves as chairman of Gardener’s Supply Company in Burlington, Vermont, which he founded in 1983. Under his leadership, the 300-person, employee-owned firm, now among the world’s largest online and catalog gardening retailers, has won national and regional awards for its products and services, as well as for its socially responsible business practices. Gardener’s Supply is the … Continued

Charles (Chuck) Turner was a community organizer and civil rights activist in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1963 with a B.A. in government. After a year spent in Washington, D.C. reporting for The Washington Afro-American Newspaper, he moved to Hartford where he joined the influential civil rights group, the Northern Student Movement. … Continued

Simon Trace is an independent consultant and writer on international development and technology. His book Rethink, Retool, Reboot: Technology As If People and Planet Mattered was published by Practical Action Publishing in July 2016. A chartered engineer with an M.A. in anthropology, Trace has 35 years of experience working in the international development sector on … Continued

Barbara Wood is the third of E. F. Schumacher’s eight children and his eldest daughter. She is a graduate in Economics and History from Bristol University, and also holds degrees in Theology. Before she married, she worked for the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action, and founded by her father) and the Voluntary Overseas … Continued

William A. Schambra joined the Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow and director of the Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal in 2003. Prior to that, he became senior vice-president for programs at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 1992. Preceding his tenure at Bradley he served as a senior advisor and … Continued

George McRobie (1926-2016) was a colleague and friend of E. F. Schumacher for twenty years and in 1965 helped him to form the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action). Upon Schumacher’s death he became chairman of the Group, honorary vice-president of the Soil Association, a founding member of the New Economics Foundation and The Other Economic Summit, … Continued

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and author who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel, in 2014, he is the founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate-change movement, and is a fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute. As a … Continued

Amory B. Lovins, a 1993 MacArthur Fellow, is a consultant physicist and environmental scientist who advocates and analyses efficient energy use and “soft energy paths”– technologies based on solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal, etc. that are commensurate with their task. Lovins has advised the energy and other industries as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy … Continued

Alanna Hartzok is an educator, activist, and lecturer in the areas of economic justice, land rights, and land-value tax reform. She is co-director of Earth Rights Institute; General Secretary for the International Union for Land Value Taxation; Global Outreach Coordinator for the Robert Schalkenback Foundation; and a member of the Advisory Council for the Prout Research … Continued

Arthur Zajonc is the former President of the Mind & Life Institute. He is also emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012, and former director of the Center for Contemplative Mind, which supports appropriate inclusion of contemplative practice in higher education, from 2009 to 2011. He was a … Continued

Jakob von Uexkull is a writer, lecturer, philanthropist, activist, and former politician. He is the founder and chair of the Right Livelihood Award (1980), often referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize; co-founder of The Other Economic Summit (1984); and founder of the World Future Council (2007). He was a member of the European Parliament … Continued

Nancy Jack Todd is is involved with administration, fund raising, program development, and outreach at Ocean Arks International. She is also editor and publisher of Annals of Earth, an ecological journal published by Ocean Arks International which brings together science, culture, the arts, and a spiritual dimension that informs them, focusing on ideas and projects that … Continued

John Todd has been a pioneer in the field of ecological design and engineering for nearly five decades. He is the founder and president of John Todd Ecological Design. Dr. Todd has degrees in agriculture, parasitology and tropical medicine from McGill University, Montreal, and a doctorate in fisheries and ethology from the University of Michigan. … Continued

Robert (Bob) Swann was the founder of the E. F. Schumacher Society, now the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. In 1974 E. F. Schumacher asked Robert Swann to start a sister organization to his own Intermediate Technology Development Group, but it was not until 1980, when prompted by Resurgence editor Satish Kumar, that Swann organized the E. F. … Continued

Joseph A. Stanislaw is founder of The JAStanislaw Group, LLC, an advisory firm specializing in strategic thinking, sustainability, and environmentally sound investment in energy and technology. Drawing on his experience as an advisor for environmentally sound investments in energy and technology, he has provided examples of actions necessary for moving toward a new energy economy. … Continued

Cathrine Sneed is the director and founder of The Garden Project in San Francisco, California, a program begun in 1992 to provide job training and support to former offenders through counseling and assistance in continuing education while also impacting the environment of their communities. Prior to the Garden Project, Cathrine founded the San Francisco County … Continued

Vandana Shiva trained as a Physicist at the University of Punjab and completed her Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario, Canada on the subject of “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory.” She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and … Continued

Kirkpatrick Sale is a widely recognized formulator and early proponent of the notion of “bioregionalism.” His development of this concept in his books, lectures, and regular radio broadcasts fueled the ever-growing interest in a local approach to the solving of growing political, economic, and environmental problems. A scholar and author, his many books have explored radical … Continued

Charlene Spretnak is the author of eight books, several of which have proposed an eco-social analysis and vision in the areas of social criticism (including feminism), cultural history, religion, and spirituality. Since the mid-1980s her books have examined the multiple crises of modernity and have furthered the corrective efforts that are arising. Her book Green Politics (1984) … Continued

Bren Smith is the owner of Thimble Island Ocean Farm and founder/executive director of GreenWave. A commercial fisherman since the age of 14, Smith pioneered the development of restorative 3D ocean farming. His work has been profiled by CNN, Google Food, The New Yorker, and Bon Appetit. His writing has appeared in The New York … Continued

Allan Savory, born in Zimbabwe and educated in South Africa (University of Natal, BS in Zoology and Botany), pursued an early career as a research biologist and game ranger in the British Colonial Service of what was then Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) and later as a farmer and game rancher in Zimbabwe. In the 1960s … Continued

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its Public Good Initiative. Founded in 1974, the Institute provides innovative strategies, working models, and information to support environmentally sound and equitable community development. Morris studied labor economics at Cornell University. After working at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, … Continued

Sally Fallon Morell is founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nutrition education nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that has fifteen thousand members and almost six hundred local chapters worldwide. Dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the American diet through education, research, and activism, the Foundation supports the wisdom of traditional diet as well … Continued

John Mohawk (1945–2006) was a scholar of American history, writer, teacher, international negotiator, cultural revivalist, and social activist. He was associate professor of American Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, and director of Indigenous Studies at its Center of the Americas. Founder of the Iroquois White Corn Project to protect small-scale indigenous … Continued

Stephanie Mills has been a writer, editor, and speaker on matters ecological, bioregional, social, and political for the past fifty years. Famous for her commencement address at Mills College in 1969, “The Future is a Cruel Hoax,” she went on to serve as the assistant editor of Co-Evolution Quarterly and editor-in-chief of Not Man Apart, Cry California, and Earth … Continued

Deborah Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, and advocate and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the United States. In the late 1960s she worked as a Kindergarten teacher in Central Harlem. In 1974, she founded Central Park Elementary School (CPE … Continued