Featured Voices

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., served as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she wrote award-winning books about our cultural and moral relations to the wet, wild world and to one another. But her increasing concern about the climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university, so she could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of climate action. 

Since then, she has spoken out across the country, publishing Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, a collection of short essays by the world’s moral leaders about our obligations to the future. That is followed by Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016); Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World (February 2021); and Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (April 2021). Her work on the extinction crisis includes a film, “The Extinction Variations,” a collaboration with a classical pianist. 

She writes from Corvallis, Oregon and from an off-the-grid cabin where two creeks and a bear trail meet a coastal inlet in Alaska.

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.

Charlotte Du Cannn writes about mythology, metaphysics and cultural change and teaches collaborative writing. From 2011-12 she founded and edited the Transition Network’s Social Reporting Project, based on the community Norwich blog, This Low Carbon Life and went on to found and edit the quarterly newspaper, Transition Free Press. In 2014/5 she collaborated with author Lucy Neal on ‘Playing for Time – Making Art as if the World Mattered’ (Oberon Books), funded by Arts Council England. She was born in London in 1956 and worked as a fashion and design journalist in London before going on the road (mostly) in the Americas – a journey she charted in ’52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth’ (Two Ravens Press, 2012) and other books. She is currently working forThe Dark Mountain Project and creating a performance and a non-fiction collection about mythos and regeneration in times fo collapse. You can find a selection of her writings at http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com Contact: theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

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.

Dr. Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, is a lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ into the Masters of Environment. He is also a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is author of Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015),Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015), and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013), and editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014).