Speakers
Petrocollapse: Social Isolation or Solidarity?
Albert K. Bates is a retired public interest attorney and author of several books on energy, environment, and history. He is a founder of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas and the Global Ecovillage Network. During his 26-year career as an attorney he argued environmental and civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and drafted a number of legislative acts. He holds a number of design patents and was inventor of the concentrating photovoltaic arrays and solar-powered and biofuel-hybrid automobiles displayed at the 1982 World's Fair. He has been Director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown since 1994, where he has taught sustainable design, natural building, agriculture and technology to students from more than 50 nations. He currently travels, teaching permaculture and natural building.
Diana Leafe Christian is author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003), about forming successful ecovillages and intentional communities and in today's financial and zoning climate in North America, and the forthcoming Finding the Ecovillage or Intentional Community of Your Dreams (New Society Publishers, Spring, 2007). She is also editor of Communities magazine, a quarterly publication about intentional communities in North America. Diana speaks and leads workshops on ecovillages nationally. Her articles have appeared in publications ranging from Mother Earth News to Canada's This Magazine, and she has been interviewed by New Dimensions Radio, NPR, and the BBC. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina.
John Darnell currently serves as Energy and Environment Projects Coordinator for a U.S. Congressman During his studies and research toward a PhD in Biochemistry, he acquired a solid grounding in Thermodynamics. The challenge of the Energy Crisis of the '70's and '80's stimulated him to try to apply the understanding and insights gained from his studies and enter the field of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. In the course of seeking ways to efficiently harness replenishable resources as alternatives to dwindling fossil fuels, he developed concepts for efficient energy conversion applicable to solar, biomass/waste, wind energy and hydropower, heat engines and heat pumps, as well as air, ground and water transportation.
Richard Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and musician. He has lectured widely, appearing on national radio and television in five countries. His essays have appeared in The Futurist, Intuition, The Sun, Brain/Mind Bulletin, Magical Blend, New Dawn, and elsewhere. His monthly, MuseLetter, was nominated in 1994 by Utne Reader for an Alternative Press Award and has been included in Utne's annual list of Best Alternative Newsletters. He is the author of The Party's Over: Energy Resources and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Powerdown: options and actions for a post-carbon world. Heinberg is a core faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on Energy and Society, and Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community. He is also an accomplished violinist and illustrator / book designer.
Michael Kane is best known as an investigative reporter for www.FromTheWildernss.com, where he has written extensively on 9/11 and energy issues. He is now intensely investigating renewable energy, having interviewed and questioned many prominent leaders in the field of renewables, as well as reading and reporting on endless industry reports. In June of 2005, Kane attended the Renewable Energy Finance Forum (REFF - Wall St.) at the Waldorf Astoria in NYC, where he questioned Steve Westly, the Controller of California, and Michael Eckhart, the president of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE). Kane contributed a chapter to Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. He is also an accomplished musician and social worker.
Jan Lundberg was educated on the high seas as a teenage sailor visiting dozens of countries before returning to his native California. He was active in environmental politics at UCLA and spent the next 15 years with the family business, Lundberg Survey. Its Lundberg Letter became known as the "bible of the oil industry" for predicting the Second Oil Shock in 1979. In 1988 he left industry and founded a nonprofit institute that has evolved into culturechange.org. Throughout the 1990s he worked to decrease society's dependence on petroleum by fighting road construction, publishing Auto-Free Times magazine, and operating Pedal Power Produce in Humboldt County, California. He lives in Berkeley where he writes and organizes cities to enact ordinances for fees on plastic bags dispensed at supermarkets.
Faith Morgan is a member of CSI 's Board of Trustees. She has traveled to Cuba three times in the last two years to learn what happened there after the fall of the USSR in 1990, when over half of Cuba 's oil subsidies were suddenly cut off. As a member of CSI, she is producing a documentary, "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil," to tell the story of this major social disaster and Cuba 's creative response to living without cheap and abundant oil.
Pat Murphy is the Executive Director of Community Service, Inc. and the designer of the organization's latest program, The Community Solution. Through this he has been exploring the small community's role in responding to global oil peak and decline. Prior to working for Community Service, Pat was the founder of a software company that developed a "design for manufacturing" program for residential building, which greatly reduced waste in the construction process and allowed better modeling for energy efficiency. He has designed and built active solar homes. Pat worked in the supercomputer business for 20 years including the development of applications for seismic data processing and reservoir modeling for the oil industry. He has attended the last three ASPO meetings in Europe , taken three trips to Cuba to evaluate their response to Peak Oil, and given keynote speeches on Peak Oil in several venues in the Midwest.
Jenna Orkin The mother of a student at Stuyvesant High School, located four blocks north of the World Trade Center, Jenna Orkin co-founded the World Trade Center Environmental Organization in the wake of 9/11. The website now features a section with articles on Peak Oil and related subjects that have been collected from the international press. A graduate of Oxford University in Music and a former cable tv interviewer of writers such as Calvin Trillin, Quentin Crisp and Fran Lebowitz, Jenna has been published in the New York Times and the national Indian newspaper The Hindu. Her writings on diverse topics are also available at wtceo.org.
Mark Robinowitz Author of Permatopia: a graceful end to cheap oil and Oil Empire: a political map to understand Peak Oil
www.permatopia.com
www.oilempire.us