Speakers' Presentations
in Order of Presentation at Teach-In (partial
list)
See Teach
In Program for Complete List
Dimensions of the Global Triple Crisis
Friday Evening - September 14, 2007
SIMON RETALLACK
Institute for Public Policy Research
Democracy Now! Interview
Simon Retallack is head of the Climate
Change Team at the Institute for Public
Policy Research (IPPR), the UK's leading
independent progressive think tank. He specializes in climate change
policy and has written about most of the world’s other major environmental problems. He is the co-author of IPPR’s
2007 report Positive Energy: Harnessing People Power to Prevent Climate Change;
co-author of IPPR’s 2006 report Trading Up: Reforming the EU Emissions Trading Scheme;
and author of IPPR’s 2005 report Setting a Long Term Climate Objective. Previously, Simon was lead researcher for the International Climate Change Taskforce; co-director of the Climate Initiatives Fund; commissioning editor, The Ecologist; managing editor, The Ecologist Special Issues; visiting fellow, the International Forum on Globalization; a member of the Board of Directors of Redefining Progress; and a member of the steering committee of the Climate and Energy Funders Group (USA). Simon studied at the London School of Economics (First Class Honours in Government and History). His other publications include: Cambiare aria al mondo (contributing author); the prize-winning book STOP, (co-author); Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (contributing author); The Case Against the Global Economy (contributing author); Climate Crisis, Climate Initiatives Fund (author); The Impact of Economic Globalization on the Natural Environment, IFG (co-author).
VANDANA SHIVA
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
Democracy Now! Interview
Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva
is founder and director of
the Research Foundation for Science,
Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi, and
an IFG board member. She received the Right Livelihood Award
in 1993, and in 2001 was named among the top five "Most Important People in Asia" by
Asiaweek magazine. She is author
of more than three hundred
papers in leading journals and numerous books,
including Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy. Vandana is a founding director of IFG.
DAVID
KORTEN
People-Centered
Development Forum
"Humanity's
Epic Choice"
PowerPoint
Presentation
Democracy
Now! Interview
Author of When Corporations Rule the World, an international bestseller
that helped expose the economic injustice being advanced through free trade agreements,
Dr. David Korten has over thirty-five years of experience in preeminent business,
academic, and international development institutions as well as in contemporary
citizen action organizations. He is founder and president of The People-Centered
Development Forum, a global alliance dedicated to the creation of just, inclusive,
and sustainable societies through voluntary citizen action, co-founder and board
chair of Positive Futures Network, and publisher of YES! A Journal of Positive
Futures, a quarterly magazine. David earned an MBA and Ph.D. from Stanford
University, served as a faculty member at Harvard University’s Graduate
School of Business, and conducted research at the Harvard Institute for International
Development. He served as a Ford Foundation project specialist in Manila and
as Asia Regional Advisor on Development Management for the US Agency for International
Development. Along with his long-standing commitments and active involvement
in organizations engaged in creating a better future, David most recently wrote The
Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
MICHAEL
KLARE
Peace and World Security Studies
Hampshire College
Democracy
Now! Interview
Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies,
and director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies,
a position he has held since 1985. Before assuming his present post, he served
as Director of the Program on Militarism and Disarmament at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He has written widely on U.S. defense policy,
the arms trade, and world security affairs, including such books as: Blood
and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on
Imported Petroleum; Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict;
and Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws. Michael is also the defense correspondent
of The Nation, and a contributing editor of Current History. He
has also contributed articles to Arms Control Today, Foreign Affairs, Foreign
Policy, Harper's, International Security, Issues in Science and Technology,
and many other journals. He serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control
Association, and the advisory board of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch;
he is also a member of the Committee on International Security Studies of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Michael received his B.A. and M.A. from
Columbia University in 1963 and 1968, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the Graduate
School of the Union Institute in 1976.
False Solutions (1)
Biofuels
Saturday Morning - September 15, 2007
LÚCIA ORTIZ
Friends of the Earth
PowerPoint Presentation
A geologist by training, Lúcia Ortiz holds a master’s degree in Geosciences by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul State (UFRGS). She is a former researcher at Fundação Estadual de Proteção Ambiental – FEPAM-RS (State Environmental Protection Agency), covering projects related to water and air contamination from coal mining and processing in power plants in the south of Brazil. In 1998, she started as a volunteer of Nucleo Amigos da Terra / Brazil (Friends of the Earth Brazil) where she worked as project manager from 2001 to 2004 and, since October 2004, is the general coordinator. Since 2001, Lúcia has been coordinator of the Energy Working Group of the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Development (FBOMS).
False Solutions (2)
Saturday Morning - September 15, 2007
TONY CLARKE
Polaris Institute
PowerPoint Presentation
A long time political activist, Tony Clarke is the director of the Polaris Institute in Canada, which works with citizen movements to develop tools and strategies for challenging corporate power in public policy making on key issues, both nationally and internationally. At present, this work includes both energy and water issues. On energy, he is actively involved in developing national and U.S. related campaign work to stop the massive Canadian tar sands production which has become the number one source of foreign oil imports to the U.S. On water, he has done extensive campaign work on bottled water, water privatization and bulk water exports and is now working with partners in the global south in building regional movements to address the new water wars emerging between city and countryside. Tony is the author or co-author of several books including Blue Gold: The Battle Against the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (with Maude Barlow) and Inside the Bottle: Exposing the Bottled Water Industry. He is also a member of the IFG board of directors.
JUTTA KILL
FERN (Forests and the European Union Resource Network) / SinksWatch Initiative
PowerPoint Presentation
FERN is a non-governmental organization that works to achieve greater environmental and social justice, focussing on forests and forest peoples' rights in the policies and practices of the European Union. Jutta Kill, whose formal education is in forest ecology, has worked as climate campaigner for FERN since 2000 and is co-founder of the Durban Group for Climate Justice. FERN’s climate campaign has contributed significantly to the Durban Group critique of carbon trading as an unsuitable instrument to tackle climate change in a just and effective manner and has become a leading voice in exposing the failings of carbon ‘offset’ schemes and proposing just and effective alternatives to offset trading. Since 2005, FERN’s climate campaign has begun to document and analyze the impacts on local livelihoods of EU biofuel targets and why such an approach is likely to exacerbate the forest crisis and delay meaningful action towards a climate-proof transport and energy policy in the EU.
Views From The South: Direct Impacts From Triple Crisis
Saturday Afternoon - September 15, 2007
SARA LARRAIN
Chile Sustentable
PowerPoint presentation
Co-founder of the Chilean national political party, the Partido Alternative de Cambio, Sara Larrain coordinates the Chilean Ecological Action Network, founded the Chilean office of Greenpeace International and was also the leading independent candidate in the 1999 Chilean presidential election. Sara's top priority is to expose the reality of the neoliberal development model as manifest in the Chilean experience. With long experience in the
peace, human rights and environmental movements Sara has seen and criticized the model from numerous points of view. After years of working on single issue campaigns, she has concluded that single issue victories really change very little so long as the development model itself remains intact, and is working to accomplish this through Chile Sustenable and as a board member of the International Forum on Globalization.
DALE WEN
International Forum on Globalization
PowerPoint Presentation
Dale Wen is a research fellow with IFG and has produced the report China Copes with Globalization: A Mixed Review. Coming from China in 1993, Dale got her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology and previously worked in the high-tech industry. Starting with voluntary work in rural China, she witnessed the plight of the rural community and began to question the top-down globalization model. Several of her papers regarding sustainable development and rural education have been presented in international conferences in China. Her primary interests are in environment, education and women’s issues. She also serves as an advisor for Rural China Education Foundation.
ATOSSA SOLTANI
Amazon Watch
PowerPoint Presentation
Atossa Soltani is the founder and executive director of Amazon Watch, the non-profit organization dedicated to defending the rainforests and the rights of indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. For the past 15 years, Atossa has been closely tracking threats to indigenous peoples and pristine frontiers of the Amazon Basin in South America and leading campaigns resulting in groundbreaking victories for indigenous peoples rights and the environment. She has documented human rights abuses and environmental disasters caused by transnational oil companies in the headwaters of the Amazon River. Together with indigenous peoples’ movements in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, Amazon Watch is effectively holding corporations and governments accountable for environmental and human rights abuses. Atossa serves on the board of directors of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs, on the Steering Council of the Amazon Alliance and on the Advisory Board of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples. Prior to founding Amazon Watch, Atossa worked for the Rainforest Action Network and the City of Santa Monica's environmental programs.
Toward A Global Grand Bargain
Saturday Afternoon - September 15, 2007
WALDEN BELLO
Focus on the Global South
Text of Speech (html page)
Text of Speech (pdf download)
Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research,
analysis, and advocacy institute based in Bangkok, Thailand, and a board member
of the International Forum on Globalization. He is the author or co-author of
ten books on Asian economic and political developments, as well as numerous articles
in international periodicals and magazines, including Foreign Policy, World Policy
Journal, and Le Monde Diplomatique. His book Dragons In Distress: Asia's Miracle
Economies In Crisis, published in 1990, is widely regarded as a classic that "predicted" the
collapse of the East Asian economies in 1997. A Siamese Tragedy: Development
And Degradation In Modern Thailand, is a bestseller that has been described by
Asiaweek as the book to read "if you want to understand where Thailand went
wrong." Formerly executive director of the Institute for Food and Development
Policy, Walden also currently serves as a professor of sociology and public administration
at the University of the Philippines.
TOM ATHANASIOU
EcoEquity
PowerPoint Presentation
In the late 1990s, Tom Athanasiou began to focus on the justice aspects of the climate crisis. In 2000, with Paul Baer, he founded EcoEquity, an activist think tank focused on the development and promotion of fair and potentially viable approaches to climate stabilization. He has been extremely active in the global climate justice movement and was one of the organizers of the Climate Action Network’s 2002 Climate Equity Summit in Bali. Also in 2002, with Baer, he co-authored Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming. Since then Tom has co-coordinated the "Greenhouse Development Rights" group, which aims to develop an international climate protection framework designed to clarify the real challenge—holding global warming below a catastrophic level while at the same time preserving the right of all people to more than merely bare-bones “human development.” In his spare time Tom is developing a new book, the working title of which is A New Deal for the Greenhouse Century.
HERMAN E. OTT
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy
PowerPoint Presentation
Dr. Hermann E. Ott, head of the Berlin Office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, studied law and politics in Munich, London and Berlin, attaining a doctorate in jurisprudence in 1997. He worked as a defense lawyer and attorney from 1992 to 1994 and joined the Wuppertal Institute as senior research fellow in 1994. He later served as Director of the Wuppertal Institute’s Climate Policy Division. From
November 2000 to June 2001, he served with Policy Planning of the German Foreign Office on foreign environmental policy. He is co-author, with Sebastian Oberthuer, of a treatise on international climate policy, The Kyoto Protocol: International Climate Policy for the 21st Century. Herman has authored many articles in reviewed and non-reviewed journals on climate policy, environmental policy and on global governance. He is also co-author of a book by the Wuppertal Institute (Ed.), Fair Future: Limited Resources and Global Justice.
Ingredients Of Systemic Change (1)
Saturday Evening - September 15, 2007
MEGAN QUINN BACHMAN
Community Solution
Text of Speech
Megan Quinn Bachman is the outreach director of The Community Solution, a non-profit organization in Yellow Springs, Ohio which promotes the re-emergence of the small community and a more agrarian and equitable low-energy-use way of life as the solution to Peak Oil. She has been writing and speaking on peak oil and its community-based solutions for more than four years. She served as master of ceremonies for the First, Second, and Third U.S. Conferences on Peak Oil and Community Solutions in Yellow Springs and at the Peak Oil and Environment conference in Washington, DC in May 2006. Megan graduated with a degree in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she studied peak oil and its implications for U.S. foreign policy and studied abroad at the University of Havana in Cuba. Her articles on peak oil have appeared in Communities magazine, Permaculture Activist, Vermont Commons, Kindred and WellBeing. Megan co-wrote and co-produced her organization's new documentary, "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil."
RICHARD HEINBERG
Author
PowerPoint Presentation
Richard Heinberg is the author of six books including The Party's Over: Oil: War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars.
He is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a core faculty
member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on “Energy and Society” and “Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community.” Richard’s
monthly MuseLetter was nominated in 1994 by Utne Reader for an Alternative Press Award and has been included in Utne's annual list of Best Alternative Newsletters. His essays and articles have appeared in many journals including Z Magazine, The Futurist, Earth Island Journal, Wild Matters, Alternative Press Review, and The Sun.
BILL MCKIBBEN
Step It Up 2007
Author
PowerPoint Presentation
Author and American environmentalist Bill McKibben writes frequently about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 after being serialized in The New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. His most recent book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, published in March 2007, addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise. In January 2007 he founded Step It Up 2007 to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With the help of six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
THOMAS PRINCEN
University of Michigan
PowerPoint Presentation
Thomas Princen explores issues of social and ecological sustainability at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. His primary focus is on the drivers of overconsumption and the conditions for restrained use of resources. He is the author of The Logic of Sufficiency and lead editor of Confronting Consumption,
both awarded the International Studies
Association's Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for the “best book in the study of international environmental problems.” He was named an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, sponsored by the Packard Foundation, and before that was a Pew Faculty Fellow for International Affairs. Thomas received his Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University in 1988 and a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Pomona College in 1975. He was a MacArthur Foundation Post-Doctoral Visiting Research Fellow in International Peace & Security
at Princeton University from 1988
to 1989. He now serves as an associate professor of Natural Resources
and Environmental Policy at the University of Michigan.
Impacting US Policy
Sunday Afternon - September 16, 2007
ROSS GELBSPAN
Author
Text of Speech
Ross Gelbspan was a reporter and editor for 31 years at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. At the Globe, he conceived, directed and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Following his retirement from daily journalism, he published The Heat Is On: the Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription. In 2004, he published a second book, Boiling Point, which received the lead review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. The review was written by Al Gore. Boiling Point was also rated one of the top science books of 2004 by Discover magazine. Recently, Ross was one of several climate advocates featured in a new film, "Everything's Cool." He has traveled and spoken extensively on the climate crisis, including appearances at The World Economic Forum, Renaissance Weekend, “Nightline,” “All Things Considered,” “Talk of the Nation,” "Now", "Frontline," and “ABC World News Tonight.” His articles on the climate issue have appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The American Prospect and a number of other newspapers and magazines. Ross has met privately with executives of Shell/EGYPT in Cairo, ExxonMobil and several other oil companies – and attended several rounds of international climate negotiations. He maintains the website www.heatisonline.org.
STEVE KRETZMANN
Oil Change International
Text of Speech
Steve Kretzmann is executive director of Oil Change International, which he founded in order to carry out strategic, systemic campaigns focused on the oil industry—such as Separation of Oil & State and End Oil Aid. Described by Rolling Stone magazine as “a whip crack petroleum economics analyst,” he has worked on energy issues and the global oil industry for the last seventeen years. After eight years with Greenpeace USA, Steve served as the environmental advisor to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People in Nigeria, and was a co-founder of the human rights and environmental organization Project Underground. In 1997, he conducted the first independent soil and water samples in Ogoni, which proved the Ogoni claim of Shell's pollution and double standards on their land. While at the Institute for Policy Studies, Steve helped coordinate a global civil society effort to engage in the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review, which recommended an end to Bank support for coal and oil projects. He has authored numerous articles and reports and is a regular commentator on issues of corporate accountability, transparency, the global oil industry, environmental and human rights.
ARJUN MAKHIJANI
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
PowerPoint Presentation
Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. He has authored and co-authored many articles, reports, and books on nuclear weapons related security, health and environmental issues. He has testified before the US Congress, served on governmental scientific advisory committees, and written for a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has appeared on national television and radio programs including ABC World News Tonight, William Buckley's Firing Line, and 60 Minutes. Arjun is principal editor of Nuclear Wastelands, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
TOM GOLDTOOTH
Indigenous Environmental Network
PowerPoint Presentation
Tom B.K Goldtooth is the national coordinator of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which is an alliance of Native grassroots groups and communities working on environmental issues. He has been a leader within Native social, economic and environmental justice movements for over 20 years. During the 1990s, he provided local, regional, national, and international leadership to Indigenous Tribal Nations and Native grassroots communities concerning environmental protection policies on and near Native lands. From the historic 1991 People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., to the present he has been an activist, advocate, organizer and policy maker within the environmental justice movement both within Native communities and beyond. He has been involved in building coalitions and linkages between the Native community, people of color communities, and environmental and health organizations. Tom is a founding board member of the Washington Office on Environmental Justice (WOEJ), the Environmental Justice Fund Initiative, the Great Lakes Regional Indigenous Environmental Justice Advisory Council Sub-Committee on Waste Facility and Siting, and has been instrumental in the creation of the Indigenous Sub-Committee at the WOEJ to address environmental justice issues impacting Tribal Nations.
Ingredients Of Systemic Change (2)
Sunday Afternoon - September 16, 2007
SUSAN GEORGE
Transnational Institute
Text of Speech
Susan George is the author of more than a dozen books and is chair of the Planning Board of the Transnational Institute, a decentralized fellowship of scholars living throughout the world whose work is intended to contribute to social justice and who are active in civil society in their own countries. Susan served as vice- president of ATTAC France (Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens). Her most recent book is Nous, Peuples d'Europe, which will also be published in Spanish and English. Her most recent book in English is Another World is Possible if.... Her academic degrees are in French/Government (B.A. Smith College, USA); Philosophy ([Licence ès Philsophie, Sorbonne) and Political Studies (Doctorate, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Paris). Her current work concerns various aspects of neoliberal globalization—particularly the World Trade Organization, international financial institutions and North-South relations. She helped to lead the campaign in France to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and is now engaged in the campaign to democratize the WTO, including the movement of "GATS-Free Zones" to which over 1500 local governments in Europe now belong.
