L. Hunter Lovins is President and founder of the Natural Capitalism Solutions. NCS educates senior decision-makers in business, government and civil society to restore and enhance the natural and human capital while increasing prosperity and quality of life. In partnership with leading thinkers and implementers, NCS creates innovative, practical tools and strategies to enable companies, communities and countries to become more sustainable.
Trained as a sociologist and lawyer (JD), Hunter co-founded the California Conservation Project (Tree People), and Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years. Lovins has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. She has consulted with large and small companies including the International Finance Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Interface, Clif Bar and Wal-Mart. Governmental clients include the Pentagon, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and other agencies, numerous cities, and the governments of Jamaica, Australia, and the U.S. She also serves an advisor to the Energy Minister of the Government of Afghanistan.
Recipient of such honors as the Right Livelihood Award, Lindbergh Award and Leadership in Business, she was named Time Magazine 2000 Hero of the Planet. She has co-authored nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 book, Natural Capitalism and 2006 Climate Protection Manual for Cities. She has served on the boards of governments, non and for profit companies.
Hunter's areas of expertise include Natural Capitalism, sustainable development, globalization, energy and resource policy, economic development, climate change, land management, and fire rescue and emergency medicine. She developed the Economic Renewal Project and helped write many of its manuals on sustainable community economic development.
She is currently a founding Professor of Business at Presidio School of Management, one of the first accredited programs offering an MBA in Sustainable Management.
www.hunterlovins.com
In her 22-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, Gloria Flora became nationally known both for her leadership in ecosystem management and for her courageous principled stands. When she was in charge of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in north-central Montana, she made a landmark decision to prohibit natural gas leasing along the spectacular 356,000-acre Rocky Mountain Front near the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a place often described as an American Serengeti for its abundant populations of elk, deer, grizzly bears, and fish-filled streams.
In 2000, she made national headlines again when she resigned as Forest Supervisor of the largest national forest in the lower 48 states - the Humboldt-Toiyabe - to call attention to antigovernment zealots engaged in the harassment and intimidation of Forest Service employees and destruction of public natural resources.
Since 2001, she is the Director of Sustainable Obtainable Solutions, a nonprofit dedicated to the sustainability of public lands and of the plants, animals and communities that depend on them. Committed to ensuring permanent protection for the Front, Flora’s decade of additional work has resulted in some amazing victories under the Bush administration. In 2007, Congress permanently withdrew the Front from all future hard rock mineral and gas leasing and the existing leases on 2/3rds of the Front have been bought out and extinguished.
Gloria recently co-authored a report on how Montana can become energy self-reliant through renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation. She serves on the Montana Climate Change Advisory Committee and works throughout the U.S. with the Center for Climate Strategies in assisting states develop climate change action plans since the most significant future impacts to public lands will be from global warming.
For her courageous stewardship of public lands, she received the Wilderness Society’s Murie Award, the Environmental Quality Award for exemplary decision-making from the Natural Resources Council of America, a ‘Behind the Headlines’ award from the Project on Government Oversight, the 2003 Environmental Hero Award from Sunset Magazine and was selected as one of the nation's top environmentalists of 2004 by Vanity Fair Magazine. Her work has been featured in a number of national magazines and on radio and television.
www.s-o-solutions.org
Peter Warshall, PhD has worked in arid land communities for over thirty years (Africa, American Southwest, California. Mexico, Guyana). As an elected official, he directed a utilities district in a small northern California community for ten years and built one of the first zero discharge sewerage plants in California. He has worked on water issues for the UN, US AID, the Tohono O’odham nation as well as numerous private sector and NGOs. At the moment, he is co-project director of the Dreaming New Mexico Project which is organizing practical solutions to water and energy issues in New Mexico.
His talk “The Unholy Triumverate” with focus of the interactions of waterflows, cashflows, and energy flows.
Trained as both a biologist and anthropologist, Peter has taken a big-picture view of the complexity of societal/cultural change. While others may work as scientists or activists or artists, Peter has tried to bridge these realms. He was environment/sustainability editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and its magazines, including a special issue in 1976 which introduced watersheds and watershed governance to the general public. He has a special sympathy toward producers of commodities (loggers, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, miners) as they are the link between the materials flows of our economy and the natural world. His teachers have included endangered squirrels, oil-slicked cormorants, rhesus monkeys and gorillas. He believes music and poetics are central needs of human happiness.
President and Founder, Biohabitats Inc
Keith recognized the need for ecological restoration more than 25 years ago, before it was even recognized as a field. Since then, this internationally recognized landscape architect has planned, designed, and managed the construction of over 200 ecological restoration projects throughout the United States. He also teaches ecological restoration seminars and workshops and participates on numerous industry panels.
Keith actively volunteers for organizations supporting ecological restoration. He’s currently serving as Chairman of the Board for the Society for Ecological Restoration International. On the rare occasion that he’s not working, Keith can be found enjoying nature with his family and dogs, exploring mountains, or playing on local rivers in his kayak.
www.biohabitats.com/ndg_newsite/events.php
Susan J. Tweit is a plant ecologist who turned to writing when she realized that she loved the stories behind the data more than collecting and analyzing the data. Her writing explores the “community of the land,” where biology, environmental concerns, and human health issues intersect in our everyday lives.
Tweit is the author of ten books, including Seasons in the Desert, a nominee for the Western States Book Award and The Rocky Mountain Garden Survival Guide, hailed as “tops” for regional gardening guides by BellaOnline.
Her writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers ranging from Audubon and Popular Mechanics to the Los Angeles Times – and has been heard on the Martha Stewart Living Radio Network. “The Refuge,” her feature on the crisis facing the sanctuary established to protect the nation’s largest elk herd recently won a Silver “Eddie” for National Parks magazine in the FOLIO Awards in New York City.
For her closing talk, “Rooting in an Unlikely Place” Tweit will draw on her experiences in reclaiming the decaying industrial site where she and her husband, sculptor Richard Cabe, live in Salida, Colorado
Jonathan Wolfe earned his doctorate in visual neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. He first discovered the beauty of fractals while a student at the Albuquerque Academy in 1987.
Chaos Theory:
Chaos is the science of surprises - it is learning to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes, clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior. Recognizing the chaotic, fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and wisdom. For example, by understanding the chaotic dynamics of the atmosphere, a balloon pilot can "steer" a balloon to a desired location.
By understanding that our ecosystems are unpredictably interconnected, we can hope to avoid actions which may end up being detrimental to our long-term well-being.
www.fractalfoundation.org/aboutus.shtm
Ketzel Levine, NPR senior correspondent, will open day 2 with her observations about plants and climate change, drawn from her current assignment on NPR’s current year-long series, Climate Connections.
Ketzel Levine has been in public radio for more than three decades. She joined NPR before the network had a morning news program, and was on the original staff of Morning Edition. After several years producing arts and sports programming, she moved to London and began her reporting career with NPR and the BBC. In 1990, Ms. Levine turned her attention to horticulture and landscape design, and began a decade of regular chats about gardening as the "Doyenne of Dirt" with NPR's Scott Simon. She also then began her garden writing career, as a contributing editor for Horticulture Magazine and a contributing writer for The Oregonian. In 2000, her book, Plant This! Best Bets For Year-Round Gorgeous Gardens, was published by Sasquatch Press.
Having already moved from D.C. to Portland, OR., Ms. Levine began her current job as a senior correspondent for Morning Edition in 2000, and has reported on everything from the restored native prairie at the Bush Texas ranch to her long night's sleep atop a 30-story high old growth spruce.
Last spring, Ms. Levine began reporting on the impact of climate change on the world's flora for the NPR series, "Climate Connections," a year-long assignment that has taken take her to places as varied as a New England dairy farm and an ancient cave in Hawaii to a tree plantation in the Brazilian Amazon. This assignment will provide the basis for Ketzel’s remarks.
Betsy Damon is an internationally known, award winning artist/ecologist who has spent the past thirty years pioneering a collaborative form of ecological art resulting in large-scale functional works that inspire, motivate, and educate. Since 1985 the focus and passion of her work has been water.
In 1995, she conceptualized the Living Water Garden in Chengdu, Sichuan, China while directing Chengdu’s first environmental public event. From 1996–1998 she directed a Chinese and US team in designing the six acre bio-remediation park, which is now a worldwide model for urban ecological solutions. She continues to work on large-scale innovative projects in China and the US, such as an award winning plan for Beijing Olympic Park. From 2002–2005, she directed projects for the Beijing planning bureau, three of which won awards. Damon has inspired such community efforts as Portland Urban Water Works, The Edwards Aquifer National Park in San Antonio, Texas—the first and only aquifer park in the US—and CURA, Chengdu Urban Rivers Association, which developed a model village project in Ping Yi county, Sichuan to clean upstream watersheds. Among her current commissions is the Trinity Lakes project in Dallas, Texas, which is a plan to create a 23-mile long, ecologically sound corridor on the Trinity River.
Damon is the recipient of numerous grants, among them the Bush Individual Artist Grant, and was most recently nominated for the Swedish Water Prize. She believes that since water is the foundation of living systems, that it must be the foundation of sustainable design and planning. For an upcoming book, she is researching the 1,000 year old culture that has sustained rural water sources in Tibet as a basis for watershed planning and economic development.
www.keepersofthewaters.org/WhoAndWhat.cfm
Charles Anderson, a Principal of Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture in Seattle, is a licensed Landscape Architect with over 20 years of experience in projects ranging from neighborhood parks to New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He has a strong background in public process and has completed many community projects. Anderson has a specific interest in expressionistic landscape restoration and in the development of urban ecologies. Museum and cultural institution work is a key interest of Charles, including projects such as the visitor centers at Mount St. Helens, the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, and Anchorage Museum of History and Art expansion Project.
He received his MLA from Harvard in 1985. Representative projects, many providing honors and/or awards include:
Anchorage Museum of History and Art; American Museum of Natural History, New York City; 2008 Olympics Competition, Beijing; Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, WA; and Seattle Art Museum, Olympic Sculpture Park, WA.
www.charlesanderson.com
David Salman is a 1979 graduate of Colorado State University with a degree in Horticultural Science. David, co-founder of Santa Fe Greenhouses retail greenhouse and nursery in 1984 and the High Country Gardens catalog/website in 1993, has expertise in a wide range of horticultural endeavors including commercial plant production and propagation as well as xeric landscape design, installation and maintenance. As Chief Horticulturist for both companies, David is the author of numerous magazine articles and writes the High Country Gardens catalog. He devotes considerable effort to breeding new perennials while searching for and evaluating the garden performance of new and unfamiliar native and adapted plants for the waterwise Western garden.
www.highcountrygardens.com
Charles Mann a free lance photographer specializing in garden and horticultural images. He has photographed four books and worked for many magazines including Horticulture, Country Living Gardener, Sunset, Fine Gardening, Phoenix Home and Garden, Better Homes and Gardens and the Santa Fean. He has presented programs to groups in Washington, Oregon, Texas, Colorado, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Charles has traveled to Japan, New Zealand, Italy, England, Alaska, Mexico and throughout the western US to photograph gardens.
Charles' latest project is a collaboration with author Marcia Tatroe of Denver called Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West.
www.charlesmannphotography.com
Gary Mallory is co-founder and president of Heads Up Landscape Contractors, a 34-year old xeriscape construction and grounds maintenance company serving central New Mexico. Long before the issue came to the forefront, Gary and his staff had been strong advocates of water conservation. Implementing a variety of experimental xeriscape methods and technologies to some of the region’s largest water-using businesses has given Heads Up exceptional insight and knowledge of the best water-saving techniques for the area. Working together with architects, contractors and property managers, Gary and his team have helped lead the region toward lower water use while beautifying the surrounding environment. Flagship xeric projects include High Desert in the Albuquerque foothills, Mariposa in Rio Rancho, Rancho Viejo and Los Campanas in Santa Fe. Today, Heads Up is one of the nation’s 100 largest landscape companies, and Gary continues to direct Heads Up toward the cutting edge in the use of sustainable, water-saving technologies.
www.headsuplandscape.com
N. Scott Momaday is a poet, a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, a playwright, a painter, a storyteller, and a professor of English and American literature. He is a Native American (Kiowa), and among his chief interests are Native American art and oral tradition. He has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2007 National Medal of Arts at the White House. He also has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Premio Letterario Internazionale “Mondello,” Italy’s highest literary award.
Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and was raised in the Indian Country in Oklahoma, New Mexico and the Southwest, where his parents, artist Al Momaday and writer Natachee Scott Momaday, were teachers employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He graduated from the University of New Mexico (BA 1958) and Stanford University (MA 1960, Ph.D. 1963).
Momaday has been a commentator of National Public Radio, the voice of the National Museum of the American Indian of the Smithsonian Institution, the narrator of the PBS documentaries including “Remembered Earth” and “Last Stand at Little Bighorn,” and a featured on-camera commentator on the PBS series “The West,” produced by Ken Burns and directed by Stephen Ives.
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