Featured Voices

Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality. In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events.
An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.

Frank Kaminski is an ardent reader and reviewer of books related to natural resource depletion, climate change and other issues affecting the fate of industrial civilization. He lives in southwestern Washington state near the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

Gunnar Rundgren has worked with most parts of the organic farmer sector – from farming to policy – since 1977, starting on the pioneer organic farm, Torfolk. Founder and Senior Consultant of Grolink AB, he worked for several United Nations agencies and development cooperation organizations including the World Bank. He was a World Board member of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements 1998 and the president 2000-2005. He has written several books, the latest being Global Eating Disorder.

Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last fifteen years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he’s written for various publications such as The Land, Dark Mountain, Permaculture Magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future and is a featured author at resilience.org.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist whose novel Prelude provides a startling reinterpretation of contemporary events and a window onto our energy future. He writes a widely followed blog on energy and the environment called Resource Insights and is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor.

For thirty years John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realize a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online, and in books; he uses them in talks for cities, and business; he also organizes festivals and events that bring the subjects of these stories together.

Joel B. Stronberg, Esq., of The JBS Group is a veteran clean energy policy analyst with over 30 years’ experience, based in Washington, DC. He writes about energy and politics in his blog Civil Notion (www.civilnotion.com) and has recently published the book Earth v. Trump: The Climate Defenders’ Guide to Washington Politics based on his commentaries. He has worked extensively in the clean energy fields for public and private sector clients at all levels of government and in Latin America. His specialties include: resiliency; distributed generation and storage; utility regulation; financing mechanisms; sustainable agriculture; and human behavior. Stronberg is a frequent presenter at conferences and workshops and may be reached at [email protected]

Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books including ‘The Party’s Over’, ‘The End of Growth’, and ‘Snake Oil’. He is Senior Fellow-in-Residence of Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators.

Tracy L. Barnett is a Mexico-based independent writer focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel. She is the founder of The Esperanza Project and author of the upcoming book, Looking for Esperanza: One Woman’s Search for Hope in the Other America.

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008). It was an instant NY Times best seller in 1992 and steadily appeared on the Business Week Best Seller list from 1992-1997. It is available now in eleven languages.

Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with the Ecosphere Studies program at The Land Institute in Salina, KS.

Jensen is associate producer and host of “Podcast from the Prairie,” with Wes Jackson. Listen to episodes at SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bill Vitek is a philosopher, educator, author and musician.  For thirty years he has collaborated with Wes Jackson–co-founder and President Emeritus of The Land Institute–on projects of mutual interest, including two co-edited books Rooted in the Land and The Virtues of Ignorance) and, since 2011, an educational framework informed by perennial, regenerative agriculture. Bill is Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College and Professor Emeritus, Clarkson University, where he taught philosophy for 32 years.