Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She serves on the boards of the International Forum on Globalization and Food and Water Watch, as well as being a Coucillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council. Maude is the recipient of six honorary doctorates, the 2005/2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award, and the 2005 Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”) for her global water justice work. She is also the best-selling author or co-author of sixteen books, including Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water and the recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute (founded in 1976), was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. One of the Institute’s major projects is research to develop perennial grains. The Land Institute has worked for over 20 years on the problem of agriculture with a primary purpose of developing an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.
Dr. Jackson’s writings include both papers and books. His most recent work, The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge, co-edited with William Vitek, was released by University of Kentucky Press in 2008 and will be available at the Conference.
The work of The Land Institute has been featured extensively in the popular media including The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, National Geographic, Time Magazine, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Life magazine named Wes Jackson as one of 18 individuals they predict will be among the 100 "important Americans of the 20th century." In the November 2005 issue, Smithsonian named him one of “35 Who Made a Difference.”
Wes Jackson is a recipient of the Pew Conservation Scholars award (1990), a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and Right Livelihood Award (Stockholm), known as “Alternative Nobel Prize” (2000). He has received four honorary doctorates and in 2007 received the University of Kansas Distinguished Service Award.
Andy Lipkis is a practical visionary leader who began planting trees to rehabilitate smog and fire damaged land around Los Angeles when he was 15 years old. He founded TreePeople in 1973 at age 18, and continues to serve as its President. TreePeople’s work in LA inspires people to take personal responsibility for the urban forest – educating, training, and supporting them as they plant and care for trees and improve the neighborhoods in which they live, learn, work and play. In 2003, the United Nations World Forestry Organization recognized TreePeople as a global model for other large cities.
Andy’s personal mission is to inspire a massive number of urban dwellers to take immediate, effective action to heal their environment. Over the past 15 years, Andy has spearheaded the use of Functioning Community Forests to create sustainable cities that engage nature and the community. This approach engages people in restoring the forest’s natural ecosystem functions on every parcel of urban land by planting and caring for trees and using tree-mimicking technologies to capture, clean, and store rainwater and recycle greenwaste. In the face of climate change, Functioning Community Forests offer critical protection against droughts and floods, reduce carbon emissions, water and air pollution, prevent diseases such as skin cancer and asthma, and provide sustainable jobs.
In his long history as an environmental leader, Andy has inspired the creation of the international Citizen Forestry movement, successfully led the planting of one million trees in Los Angeles before the 1984 Summer Olympics, coordinated numerous disaster relief efforts during flood and fire, co-authored the “bible” of citizen forestry, The Simple Act of Planting a Tree, and shaped L.A.’s integrated watershed management policies. Andy’s honors include being named to the U.N. Environment Programme’s Global 500 Roll of Honour (with wife Kate). In 2007, Andy was named a Durfee Fellow and received the Boeing Crystal Vision Award. For more information on TreePeople visit www.treepeople.org.
Deborah Madison, founding chef of San Francisco’s Greens restaurant, has long been committed to finding local and sustainable ways of feeding ourselves, and has, through cooking, writing, and teaching helped chefs, home cooks, and young people make that connection for themselves. Greens, which opened in l979, was one of the first restaurants to make cooking from farm and garden the driving force behind its menu. In collaboration with Green Gulch Farm, Deborah was able to introduce foods that were then new to the dining public, such as arugula, fingerling potatoes, the many colorful varieties of lettuces, cucumbers, tomatoes, and other edibles that are now a familiar part of the culinary landscape. Since that time she has continued working to introduce and teach about cherished plant foods through cooking classes, writing books and articles on food and farming, through her participation in her local farmers market.
Deborah is the author of nine cookbooks several of which have garnered national awards.Among her books, Local Flavors, Cooking and Eating from Americas Farmers’ Markets, explores the joys and benefits of shopping, cooking and eating locally based on visits to more than one hundred farmers markets across the United States. Deborah has been a contributor to such magazines as Gourmet, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, Organic Gardening, Garden Design, Saveur, Orion, as well as to numerous blogs. A long-time member of Slow Food, Deborah has served on Slow Food’s Ark and Presidia Committee, which endeavors to list and preserve endangered foods of high quality and historical significance. Currently she is a board member of The Foundation for Biodiversity in Italy, The Seed Savers Exchange in the Untied States as well as the Southwest Grasslands Livestock Association.
Website: www.deborahmadison.com
Andrew Parker is a Royal Society Research Fellow at Oxford University's Department of Zoology. He has been named by the London Times as one of the three most important young scientists in the world for his work in investigating and answering the great riddle of the Cambrian explosion.
Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics—applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields, including water conservation. (Biomimicry is another related term.)
He was highlighted in the feature article in April 2008 National Geographic – “Biomimetics – Design By Nature” – an article describing water gathering and water conservation techniques discovered in a Nambian beetle and a reptile that can drink with its leg.
Andrew Parker was one of the eight “Scientists for the New Century” selected by The Royal Institution (London) and The Times/Novartis in 2000.
He is also the Science Advisor to the Prince of Wales.
Paul Stamets has written six mushroom-related books. Several are used as textbooks around the world by the gourmet and medicinal mushroom industries. He is the author of many scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals (The International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms; Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM, Oxford University Press); Herbalgram, and others).
He has written more than a twenty patents. He started a mushroom wholesale and retail sales business, Fungi Perfecti, LLC, in 1980. (See www.fungi.com.) The business has four laboratories, 10,000 sq. ft. of clean rooms, and is equipped with 20+ laminar flow benches for doing in vitro propagation work. Paul has received several environmental awards. He is an advisor to the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School, Tucson; on the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, and was appointed to the G.A.P./G.M.P. Board of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia. Dr. Andrew recommends his products. Stamets is the supplier and co-investigator of the first two NIH funded clinical studies using medicinal mushrooms in the United States. His strain collection is extensive and unique, with many of the strains coming from old growth forests. He is involved in several other research trials ongoing and pending.
He received the 1998 "Bioneers Award" from The Collective Heritage Institute, and the 1999 "Founder of a New Northwest Award" from the Pacific Rim Association of Resource Conservation and Development Councils. In 2008, Paul received the National Geographic Adventure’s Magazine’s Green-O-vator and the Argosy Foundation’s E-chievement Awards.
Married to C. Dusty Yao, a plant fanatic, who shares a passion for fungi and their love of the Old Growth forests. Both believe that people properly armed with fungal wisdom can help save the planet.
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