Speakers
LOCAL speakers, events, and workshops…
2010Bioneers Conference
Schedule of Plenary Speakers
Beamed in from California during the Conference, this speaker lineup will be viewed in Milliken Auditorium on the campus of Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City on the afternoons of October 15, 16, and 17. Keep an eye on this page to see the fantastic lineup of local talent we will have for you the mornings of those days!
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Friday Plenaries 1:30pm-5:00pm
John Francis, gave up using motorized vehicles after witnessing the devastating effects of an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the early 1970’s. Since, he has served as a goodwill ambassador for the UN Environmental Program, contributed to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and founded Planetwalk, an environmental education nonprofit. Author of Planetwalker, John will explore the environmental crisis as a reflection of worldwide social and economic inequity.
JESSY TOLKAN is among the nation’s most effective youth activists. In 2006, she was named one of the REAL HOT 100 Women in America for her work registering 130,000 young voters. Today she serves as Political Director of Green For All, seeking climate justice and green jobs for low-income communities and communities of color. She will outline what’s required to get us to a clean energy future that’s green for all.
DR. JAMES HANSEN is among the world’s top climate scientists, he describes the dire urgency for dramatic global climate action, including the immediate end to new coal plants. Since 1981 he has served as head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He will share his personal odyssey into climate action, including civil disobedience.”
MALLIKA DUTT is founder and Executive Director of Breakthrough, an innovative international human rights organization using the power of popular culture, media and community education to transform public attitudes and advance equality, justice, and dignity. She has conceived and led Breakthrough’s award-winning campaigns on violence against women and immigration reform that have reached millions. She’ll share this organization’s journey of transforming hearts and minds to build cultures that respect dignity for all.
PETER WARSHALL, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Dreaming New Mexico (DNM) and a world-renowned water steward, maniacal naturalist, research scientist and former public official, portrays this inspiring systemic model of place-based restoration. DNM (a Bioneers project) produced a statewide vision of all aspects of a region’s food system.
DNM provides a “globalocalized” model for envisioning and implementing do-able dreams to leverage the way we produce, market and eat food.
Saturday Plenaries 1:30pm-5:00pm
ELIZABETH K. LINDSEY Ph.D., is an award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist committed to ethnographic rescue and the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and tradition. The first female National Geographic Fellow and a descendant of Hawaiian chiefs, English seafarers and Chinese merchants, she was raised by Hawaiian elders who prophesied her role as a steward of ancestral wisdom. She will describe her 2010 186-day expedition by seaplane, and present her findings.
ANDY LIPKIS is one of the nation’s great leaders of community-based urban environmental initiatives. He has led a highly successful and visionary integrated watershed management process in Los Angeles that resulted in the first major urban Department of the Watershed. Andy will share cutting-edge efforts in cities that integrate urban forests and natural ecosystems with wise human engineering.
MARY GONZALES, a Mexican-American Chicago native, is a legendary community organizer and California Director for Gamaliel Foundation, an international institute building faith-based organizing (and which trained Barack Obama as a community organizer). She will discuss the Enironment and Its Relationship to Equity and the Economy.
JOHN WARNER is a seminal founder of Green Chemistry, he co-founded the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, and was formerly a professor of Community Health and Sustainability and of Plastics Engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Author of over 100 patents, papers and books including Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, he will explore the opportunities to learn from nature about materials and the very process of innovation and creativity.
GARY HIRSHBERG, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest organic yogurt company that he helped start 27 years ago. In 2005, he was named managing director of Stonyfield Europe, a joint venture with Groupe Danone (France). He’s also Chairman and co-founder of O’Naturals, a chain of natural fast-food restaurants. A visionary sustainability activist for over 33 years, Gary is working with large companies to reduce their health-care costs by motivating employees to adopt self-care practices.
SUNDAY PLENARIES 1:30am-5:00pm
LYNNE TWIST, visionary co-founder of The Pachamama Alliance, will explore the origin, evolution and scope of this cutting-edge group’s work, including its most recent accomplishments assisting the Ecuadorian government to embed the rights of nature in its national Constitution, the first in the world. She’ll also report on the Four Years Go campaign to help catalyze dramatic global transformation.
john a. powell, an internationally recognized authority in civil rights and liberties, structural racialization, ethnicity, housing, poverty and democracy, is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State. He holds the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the University’s College of Law. He founded the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota; was National Legal Director of the ACLU; co-founded the Poverty & Race Research Action Council; and has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia.
GLORIA FELDT A bestselling author, her newest book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power offers practical tools for leading and living unlimited. Former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and board member of Women’s Media Center, she teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University. Gloria Feldt shares her personal journey from timid teen to nationally prominent women’s rights leader.
Dr. ANTHONY CORTESE, a groundbreaking leader in transforming higher education, is Founder and President of Second Nature, supporting senior college and university leaders in making healthy, just and sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education. He is a principal organizer of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, as well as co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Anthony will survey some of the most promising developments in education, and what still needs to happen.
JANE GOODALL, Ph.D, DBE. Fifty years ago, Dr. Goodall, who is today a world-renowned primatologist, conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace, first set foot on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. The chimpanzee behavioral research she pioneered there has produced a wealth of scientific discovery, and her vision has expanded into a global mission to empower people to make a difference for all living things. Dr. Goodall will reflect – both personally and professionally – on the meaning of the past five decades, the extraordinary changes the world has seen since 1960, and the impact these changes have had on people, animals and the environment we all share.
