great turning conference keynote and facilitator biographies

Keynote Biographies

David Abram, cultural ecologist, philosopher, and educator, is Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as Environmental Ethics, Tikkun, Orion, Parabola, Adbusters, and The Ecologist, as well as in many edited anthologies in a host of disciplines. Named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, David has been the recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and Watson Foundations. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth. David lives with his family in northern New Mexico, where he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture. The New England Aquarium sponsored a large public debate between David Abram and distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and ethics. In 2005, David was invited to give the keynote address for the United Nations “World Environment Week” to 70 mayors from the largest cities around the world. The address was given under the towering redwood trees at Muir Woods, at the very spot where the United Nations charter was originally signed into being sixty years earlier.

Ludovic Blain is a non-profit entrepreneur, author and consultant working on issues of racial justice, generational transitions in progressive organizations, strategic communications and progressive issue advocacy.  Ludovic co-founded several organizations and projects, including the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Northeast Network for Environmental Justice, the Generational Leadership Listening Sessions and the Progressive Communicators Network. Mr. Blain most recently was Organization Services Director of the New Progressive Coalition, LLC, focusing on encouraging synergy and collaboration among NPC 501(c)3, 501(c)4, 527 and PAC members.  Previous to that Mr. Blain was Associate Director of the Democracy Program at Demos, where he supported state-based campaigns for Election Day Registration, felon enfranchisement, and other voting rights issues. Immediately prior to that Ludovic served as Associate Director of We Interrupt This Message - a national media justice organization, where he founded the NY office and led national development efforts. Ludovic has served as board chair, New York City Council lobbyist, and founding director of the environmental justice program at the New York Public Interest Research Group.  Mr. Blain also led civil society efforts abroad. He shared issue advocacy best practices with nationalist communities in Northern Ireland, provided campaign advice to Haitian environmentalists, and anti-racist and anti-xenophobic advice to the then-ruling party of Denmark.  He has received honorary citizenship for his work with youth activists in The Gambia.

Leslie G. Fields, ESQ. is the National Environmental Justice Director for the Sierra Club. She brings twenty years of international, federal, state and local environmental justice and environmental law and policy experience to her work with the Sierra Club. Ms. Fields is the former International Director of Friends of the Earth-US (an environmental NGO) in Washington, D.C. She is currently an adjunct law professor at Howard University School of Law (co-teaching international environmental law and co-coordinating the Environmental Law Clinical Externship). She has worked with community groups, nonprofit organizations, the private sector and all levels of government, and is particularly interested in the intersection of international environmental justice, democracy, corporate and civic governance and globalization. Ms. Fields has worked extensively on oil/gas natural resource extraction issues (e.g. the West African Gas Pipeline), climate change and water privatization in West and Southern Africa. She has also spent vast amounts of her spare time on the boards of: Horn Relief  (a Somali women’s development/environmental organization), CERES (the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies), the National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN), the Texas NAACP and with EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council’s International Subcommittee. Leslie Fields is a graduate of Cornell University and the Georgetown University Law Center.

Winona LaDuke is an enrolled member of the Mississippi band of Anishinaabe, and a celebrated Native American and environmental activist.  She is the founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, and program director of Honor the Earth.  An accomplished writer, she has written fiction and non-fiction books; her most recent book is Recovering the Sacred:  The Power of Naming and Claiming.  In 1994 she was named as one of America’s most promising leaders under 40 by Time magazine, and has received many other awards, including the 2003 Slow Food Award for her work to protect wild rice and local biodiversity, and the 1997 Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year.  She ran as a Green Party vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000. www.nativeharvest.com

Dana Lyons brings together a mix of comedy, ballads and love songs. His sharp wit and beautiful voice have him performing at concert halls, festivals, conventions, fundraisers and universities across the US and around the world. Dana’s music style includes a bit of everything; his biggest radio hit, “Cows With Guns,” receives crossover radio play on country, rock, alternative, community, college and oldies radio stations worldwide. He has seven releases to date, including his latest two, released in 2004: “Circle the World: Songs & Stories” with Dr. Jane Goodall and “Ride the Lawn.” Dana has toured in 46 of the 50 American states, around the East Coast of Australia and across Ireland, England, New Zealand, Mexico, Kazahkstan and Siberia. Dana performs at festivals ranging from Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young to the Harley Davidson Festival in Sturgis, South Dakota where he shared the stage with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Steppenwolf, Nazareth and Blue Oyster Cult. Two of Dana’s songs have been made into award-winning illustrated books: Cows With Guns, published by Penguin (winner of the Bullitzer Prize), and The Tree, published by Illumination Arts. The Tree was endorsed by Dr. Jane Goodall, has forwards by Pete Seeger and Julia Butterfly Hill and has won numerous awards. www.cowswithguns.com

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. He is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College. Prior to his arrival at Middlebury, he was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. The recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, he was awarded the 2000 Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing. His book Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape is about a solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks. His forthcoming book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, will address what McKibben sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envision a transition to more local-scale enterprise. He is also currently working on a major anthology of environmental literature for the Library of America. It will follow the thread of the growing U.S. concern with the deterioration of our natural world from its beginnings in Henry David Thoreau's small cabin up to today's battles over pollution and global warming. www.billmckibben.com

Ted Nordhaus is an author, researcher, and political strategist. Ted is a managing partner of American Environics, a new research and consulting firm created to bring cutting edge research and methodologies used to understand the evolution of American social values to progressive political projects. Over the last twenty years, Ted has run major campaigns and initiatives for a large assortment of environmental and progressive political causes including the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, and Clean Water Action. Nordhaus also served as the Campaign Director for Share the Water, a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, farmers, and urban water agencies advocating reform of federal water policies in California, Executive Director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project, and as a partner and political strategist with Next Generation, a political consulting firm serving environmental organizations and campaigns. For the last four years, Ted has been a pollster and Vice President at Evans McDonough Company, an opinion research firm based in Oakland. www.thebreakthrough.org

Coleen O’Connell has been an ecological educator for twenty-three years. Her work has taken her to India, Europe, Canada and most of the United States. As former Education Director for Audubon Expedition Institute at Lesley University, she co-designed the first master’s degree in Ecological Teaching and Learning (ETL) in the country. In her role as faculty for the ETL program for the past eight years, Coleen has guided faculty and graduate students in defining the emergent qualities and skills of an ecological educator. Coleen co-founded the Maine Earth Institute, whose mission is to motivate individuals to examine and transform personal values and habits, and accept responsibility for Earth’s health. She has been trained by Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and activist, in facilitating The Work to Reconnect. Just prior to the conference, Coleen will attend a month-long international gathering of activists with Joanna Macy called Seeds of the Future II  to design practices for the healing of the world during The Great Turning.  http://www.lesley.edu/gsass/audubon/etl_index.html
 

Facilitator Biographies

Lily Fessenden is the Director of the Audubon Expedition Institute at Lesley University. Lily also serves on the board of directors for the Institute for Body, Mind and Spirit at Lesley. Before AEI, she was Executive Director and faculty for the Geocommons College Program, a study abroad experience focused on communities working towards a sustainable future. Lily also directed the Northeast Initiative, a program helping secondary schools integrate sustainability into their school improvement efforts. She is currently involved in a sustainable living experiment on 152 acres in Searsmont, Maine.

Jim Rough is the originator and principal seminar leader for Dynamic Facilitation Skills. He runs many dynamic facilitation projects through his work with the Center for Wise democracy in Seattle.  He has been leading public seminars and evolving these concepts of Dynamic Facilitation and Choice-creating for over ten years. Since 1980, Jim has been a faculty member at the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. He has spoken at many conferences, published numerous articles and is working on a new book about Dynamic Facilitation. Before founding Jim Rough and Associates, Inc. in 1985, Jim worked as an internal consultant within Boeing, Xerox, and Simpson Timber Company. www.WiseDemocracy.org

Michael B. Schwartz  is an artist and muralist.  His work includes murals, paintings, drawings, writings and the facilitation of participatory visual arts projects that employ a unique and refreshing approach to creating art with people. His work has been recognized through a series of awards including the Anne Moreton Scholarship, Puffin Foundation, and Art Matters Fellowships. Schwartz’s murals can be found around the world with work in Canada, Jamaica, Guatemala, India and the United States. He is a founder of the Tucson Arts Brigade, a past board member of the Alliance for Cultural Democracy, and has spent many years bringing the arts into schools, community centers and streets. His current body of studio paintings, ink and multi media drawings revolve around themes of urban eco mythology, spirituality, social evolution, history and memory. Most recently he completed successful arts education projects with the Fleisher Art Memorial and community murals with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. www.MichaelBSchwartz.com