Featured Voices

Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 17 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, is a featured author at www.resilience.org and a current director of the Ecological Land Co-op. Chris’ latest book is: A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth.

Bart Hawkins Kreps is a long-time bicycling advocate and free-lance writer. His views have been shaped by work on highway construction and farming in the US Midwest, nine years spent in the Canadian arctic, and twenty years of involvement in the publishing industry in Ontario.

Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is now the Ecosphere Studies Research Fellow at the Land Institute. Cox is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) and Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine. His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Kansas City Star, Arizona Republic, The New Republic, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Salon, and Dissent, and in local publications spanning 43 U.S. states. In 2012,The Atlantic named Cox their “Readers’ Choice Brave Thinker” for his critique of air conditioning. He is based in Salina, Kansas. Stan Cox is on the editorial board of Green Social Thought, and he is also the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020) and the upcoming The Path to a Livable Future: Forging a New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, both from City Lights Books.

Jody has a Bachelors Degree in Geology, a Masters Degree in Soil Science and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. She developed a composting and soil manufacturing process at Purdue University in 1996, which has grown into a commercial business called Soilmaker; selling compost, organic soil, and composted mulch. Her family lives in an earth-sheltered home powered by solar PV energy, where she maintains many of the values and traditions she learned as a child. . She is a regular contributor to Anima/Soul.

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 thejbsgroup78@gmail.com.

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.

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.

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, 2018). And author of Blessing the Hands that Feed Us; Lessons from a 10-mile diet (Viking Penguin, 2013), which recounts her adventures in hyper-local eating and what she learned about food, farming, belonging, and hope.

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.

Richard Heinberg is the author of fourteen books including ‘Power,’ ‘The End of Growth’, and ‘The Party’s Over’. He is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost educators on the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.

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.

Adrian Ayres Fisher serves as a volunteer steward of a small forest preserve on the banks of the Des Plaines River in Illinois. As programs co-chair of West Cook Wild Ones, she educates about and promotes native-plant gardening and biodiversity. She writes and speaks on a range of nature-related topics from a Midwestern point of view. Her home is in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago and she blogs at Ecological Gardening.