Featured Voices

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.

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is member of the scientific committee of ASPO (Association for the study of peak oil) and regular contributor of "The Oil Drum" and "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.

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.

Chris Smaje works a small mixed farm in Somerset and blogs at smallfarmfuture.org.uk. He’s written on environmental and agricultural issues for publications like The Land, Permaculture Magazine and in Dark Mountain: Issue 6, and also in academic journals (Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems; the Journal of Consumer Culture; the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture). Trained in anthropology and social science, he previously worked at the Universities of Surrey and London.

Rob Hopkins is the cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network.

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.

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]

James Magnus-Johnston is a PhD researcher at McGill University in the Leadership for the Ecozoic program. He’s the Co-director of the Centre for Resilience at Canadian Mennonite University, where he teaches in the fields of business, political studies, and economics, and he serves as a board director with the Assiniboine Credit Union. James previously worked in finance, public policy, and as a social entrepreneur—helping to establish services in food, housing, and experiential learning. He completed an MPhil in Economics at the University of Cambridge, where he studied the growth requirement of the debt-based money system.

John Foran is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of development and globalization beyond capitalism. He is the author of Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (2005). His research and activism are now centered within the global climate justice movement, and much of it can be found at the Climate Justice Project and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory.

Former newspaper editor Brian Kaller wrote his first magazine cover story on peak oil in 2004, and since then has written for the ‘American Conservative’, the ‘Dallas Morning News’, ‘Front Porch Republic’, ‘Big Questions Online’ and

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.