Julian Aguon is an activist lawyer and writer from Guam and the author of the acclaimed new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light. He is the visionary behind Blue Ocean Law, a progressive firm that works at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice. He serves on the Council of Progressive International—a global collective that launched in May 2020 to mobilize progressive forces around the world behind a shared vision of social justice.

Aguon delivered his  lecture at the 41st Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures on October 24, 2021.

Winona LaDuke—an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) member of the White Earth Nation—is an environmentalist, economist, author, and prominent Native American activist working to restore and preserve indigenous cultures and lands.

She graduated from Harvard University in 1982 with a B.A. in economics (rural economic development) and from Antioch University with an M.A. in community economic development. While at Harvard, she came to understand that the problems besetting native nations were the result of centuries of governmental exploitation. At age 18 she became the youngest person to speak to the United Nations about Native American issues.

In 1989 LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, focusing on the recovery, preservation, and restoration of land on the White Earth Reservation. This includes branding traditional foods through the Native Harvest label.

In 1993 LaDuke gave the Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture entitled “Voices from White Earth.” That same year she co-founded and is executive director of Honor the Earth, whose goal is to support Native environmental issues and to ensure the survival of sustainable Native communities. As executive director she travels nationally and internationally to work with Indigenous communities on climate justice, renewable energy, sustainable development, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and human rights.

Among the books she has authored are All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, 2016); The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings (2002); Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); The Militarization of Indian Country (2013).

LaDuke’s many honors include nomination in 1994 by Time magazine as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40; the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women’s Leadership in 1997, and the Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998. In 1998 Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007, and in 2017 she received the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy, and Tolerance.

Winona LaDuke was an active leader as a Water Protector with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2017 at Standing Rock, where the Sioux Nation and hundreds of their supporters fought to preserve the Nation’s drinking water and sacred lands from the damage the pipeline would cause. Over the years her activism has not deviated from seeking justice and restoration for Indigenous peoples.

Leah Penniman is an educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. Penniman is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs – including farmer trainings for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for people living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system.

Penniman holds an MA in Science Education and BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University. She has been farming since 1996 and teaching since 2002. The work of Penniman and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Omega Sustainability Leadership Award, Presidential Award for Science Teaching, NYS Health Emerging Innovator Awards, and Andrew Goodman Foundation, among others. She is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018).

Since the early 1980’s Hazel Henderson’s name has been synonymous with impact investing. Probably more than any other person, Henderson has been responsible for creating and promoting a set of social and environmental indicators by which to judge the real health of an economic system including the well-being of its citizens and its ecosystem. These indicators are then widely used to guide business practices and investment decisions.

A prolific commentator and critic of contemporary economics, Henderson launched Ethical Markets Media to provide a platform for discussion of these issues and to showcase examples of a well-being approach.

We are proud to honor over four decades of collaboration with Hazel Henderson with this Conversation.

Juliet Schor is both a sociologist and an economist.  That unique combination leads her to ask what the citizen/consumer can do to affect a more just and regenerative economy and conversely explores the impact of our current economic system on our daily lives.

The titles of her books speak to this dual interest:

• The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
• The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need
• Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture
• Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

Publishers Weekly named her just released After the Gig:How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back, one of the Big Indie Books of 2020. In it Schor examines how the platform economy which promised flexibility and new opportunities for workers instead became exploitive.  

Her carefully researched book goes on to offer strategies for how citizens can take back these platforms so that they are tools for a better way of working leading to a more regenerative economy. Not surprising, one of the problems she points to is corporate for-profit ownership of the platforms themselves. She instead recommends a cooperative ownership by the users on the platform. 

Neva Goodwin is co-founder and co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where her projects have included editing a six-volume series, Frontier Issues in Economic Thought (published by Island Press) and a Michigan Press series, Evolving Values for a Capitalist World.  She has edited more than a dozen books, and is the lead author of three introductory textbooks: Microeconomics in Context, Macroeconomics in Context, and Principles of Economics in Context.

Over the past decade Dr. Goodwin led the creation of a “social science library” called Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being which contains nearly 10,000 full bibliographic references, representing seven social sciences, and including full text PDFs for a third of the referenced articles and book chapters.

Stewart Wallis was the executive director of the New Economics Foundation, the UK’s leading think tank for social, economic, and environmental justice, from 2003 through 2015.

He graduated in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and began his career in marketing and sales with Rio Tinto Zinc. After receiving a master’s degree in business and economics at London Business School, Wallis spent seven years with the World Bank in Washington, DC, working on industrial and financial development in East Asia. He then spent nine years with Robinson Packaging (UK), the last five years as Managing Director leading a successful business turnaround.

In 1992 he joined Oxfam as International Director, gradually assuming responsibility for 2500 staff in 70 countries and for all Oxfam’s policy, research, development, and emergency work worldwide. In 2002 he was awarded Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for service to Oxfam.

Stewart Wallis is also a board member of the New Economy Coalition (USA), Vice-Chair for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values, and Trustee of the Forum’s Inclusive Growth Global Challenge. His expertise includes global governance, functioning of markets, links between development and environmental agendas, the future of capitalism, and the moral economy.

Otto Scharmer understands the stages of consciousness that are necessary to achieve transformation – whether that be transformation of the self, transformation of a group initiative, transformation of a business, or systemic change.  His Theory U training is a step by step exploration of these stages in different settings.  An economist by training, his application of Theory U to our economic system provides one of the clearest blueprints of how to move “from an old paradigm of economic thought that revolves around ego-system awareness to a new paradigm that revolves around eco-system awareness, by which I mean focusing on a compassion-based well-being of all, the well-being of the whole”
 

His work at MIT’s Presencing Institute “activates a means of learning that connects people to their deeper sources of creativity—that is, to their capacity for intuiting and then actualizing emerging future possibilities.” 

Matt Stinchcomb is the cofounder of The Boatbuilders, a new initiative that provides financial, strategic, and tactical support to organizations, projects, and communities working to build a more resilient future in the Hudson Valley. Prior to this, he was the Executive Director at the Good Work Institute, a nonprofit organization with a mission to cultivate, connect, support, and illuminate a network of people and initiatives working towards Just Transition in the Hudson Valley.  Before heading up the Good Work Institute, Stinchcomb was the VP of Values and Impact at Etsy.com. In that role he oversaw the stewardship of the company’s mission, and worked to give all employees the means and the desire to maximize the benefit their work has on people and the planet.

Stinchcomb serves on the Board of Directors for the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Hawthorne Valley Association, and The Good Work Institute. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and lives in Rhinebeck, NY with his wife and children.

Mary Berry is the Executive Director of The Berry Center and a leader in the movement for sustainable agriculture. A well-known advocate for the preservation of rural culture and agriculture, she is currently working to reconnect cities with landscapes around them. Founded in 2011, The Berry Center advocates for small farmers, land conservation, and healthy regional economies by focusing on land use, farm policy, farmer education, urban education about farming, and local food infrastructure. Its goal is to establish within the Commonwealth of Kentucky a national model of urban-rural connectedness.

Berry is attempting to restore a culture that has been lost in rural America. She continues the advocacy of her grandfather, father, and uncle for land-conserving communities. When President Obama appointed her to Kentucky’s Farm Service Agency State Board, she took on a public role in an effort to change policy.

For 32 years she farmed for a living— first as a dairy farmer, then raising tobacco, and later raising organic vegetables as well as pastured poultry and beef. From 2002 until 2011 she catered events at her winery.

She serves on the Board of United Citizens Bank in New Castle, Kentucky, and on the Board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She writes for the periodical Edible Louisville and speaks widely as a proponent of small farmers.

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and author who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel, in 2014, he is the founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate-change movement, and is a fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute.

As a student at Harvard he was editor and president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. Immediately after graduation he joined The New Yorker magazine as a staff writer and wrote much of the “Talk of the Town” column from 1982 to 1987.

McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, appeared in 1989 after being serialized in The New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change and has been printed in more than 20 languages; he has gone on to write a dozen more books, among them Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), which addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions as a transition to more local-scale enterprise. McKibben won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.

The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize. In 2009 Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and Microsoft Network named him one of the dozen most influential men. The Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”
 McKibben writes frequently in a wide variety of publications including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. He lives with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern,  and his daughter in the mountains above Lake Champlain where he spends as much time as possible outdoors.

In 2014, biologists honored him by naming a new species of woodland gnat— Megophthalmidia mckibbeni— in his honor.

Nwamaka Agbo is a nationally respected voice for impacted communities, working to ensure they are not left behind with the growing New Economy movement.  Her approach, which she names Restorative Economics, is strategically focused on community-owned and community-governed projects to bring residents together to create shared prosperity and self-determination and in turn build collective political power.

Stacy Mitchell has for decades been the go-to person to help craft city, state, and federal legislation that protects the small and the local.  Her formidable research has laid bare the stranglehold large corporations have on commerce creating an unfair playing field for independent businesses. She is a sought-after commentator by national media, trusted to have evidence at her fingertips.  While a sharp critic of big corporations, she is at the same time an eloquent spokesperson for small businesses and the local economies and communities they help shape. 

Wes Jackson is one of the foremost figures in the international sustainable agriculture movement. In addition to being a world-renowned plant geneticist, he is a farmer, author, and professor emeritus of biology.

He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan University, and a tenured full professor at California State University, Sacramento. There he established and chaired one of the first Environmental Studies programs in the United States. In 1976 he left academia to co-found The Land Institute, a nonprofit educational organization in Salina, Kansas. There he conceptualized Natural Systems Agriculture—including perennial grains, perennial polycultures, and intercropping, all based on the model of the prairie.

He is a Pew Conservation Scholar, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Right Livelihood Laureate (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize). Smithsonian Magazine has said that Jackson’s mission is “the overthrow of agriculture as we know it,” and included him in its “35 Who Made a Difference” list in 2005. Life Magazine named him among the 100 “most important Americans of the 20th century.” He is a member of The World Future Council and the Green Lands, Blue Waters Steering Committee.

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics as well as Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and executive director of the Oberlin Project. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his leading role in the promising new field of ecological design.

Throughout his career he has served as a board member of or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is a trustee of Bioneers, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute.

At Oberlin he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy. The story of that building is told in two of his books, The Nature of Design (2002), which Fritjof Capra called “brilliant,” and Design on the Edge (2006), which architect Sim van der Ryn describes as “powerful and inspiring.”

John and Nancy Todd and a group of scientist friends established the New Alchemy Institute on a twelve-acre site in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Greg Watson joined the staff in 1980. He was inspired to apply New Alchemy's strategies and solutions to urban areas. He and John Todd have remained life-long friends making it a point to lunch together each week whenever possible.

New Alchemy influenced a generation who “moved back to the land” with the vision of living more sustainably. Organic gardening, aquaculture, bioshelters, plant-filtered waste-water treatment, compost toilets, renewable energy systems were all modeled, and the designs shared, by New Alchemy. Fritz Schumacher and Buckminster Fuller were among those who made pilgrimages to witness and support the work done there.

Both Todd and Watson moved on to other projects, but the principles and systems thinking described in New Alchemy’s mission statement continue to direct their work as it evolves to solve emerging problems of the day.

Greg Watson is Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. His work currently focuses on community food systems and the dynamics between local and geo-economic systems.

Watson has spent nearly 40 years learning to understand systems thinking as inspired by Buckminster Fuller and to apply that understanding to achieve a just and sustainable world.

John Todd has been a pioneer in the field of ecological design and engineering for nearly five decades. He is the founder and president of John Todd Ecological Design. Dr. Todd has degrees in agriculture, parasitology and tropical medicine from McGill University, Montreal, and a doctorate in fisheries and ethology from the University of Michigan. He is professor emeritus and distinguished lecturer at University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School and a fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at UVM. He is also the founder and president of Ocean Arks International, a non-profit research and education organization; and co-founder of New Alchemy Institute, a research center that has done pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture and bioshelters. He has been an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and assistant professor at San Diego State University.

John McKnight’s approach to community development is to turn attention to the assets of a neighborhood rather than elaborate on its problems.  For instance, he would suggest that the primary wealth in a neighborhood is the power generated by the investment of the capacities of the residents and their associations.  

Called Asset Based Community Development, John McKnight has influenced and trained three generations of community activists in Chicago and beyond including, famously, Barack Obama. A close associate of Ivan Illich, he has provided both the vision and practice for a solution-oriented approach to community organizing.  

Historian, political economist, and activist, Gar Alperovitz is a noted expert on policy issues as they pertain to cooperative ownership, diversification of wealth, fair labor laws, anti-discrimination, community control, and ecological sustainability.  

Working for decades in Washington, DC to influence a transition to a more just society, he is also well known for his opposition to nuclear power and the role he played in helping to secure the Pentagon Papers.  

Heinberg and Norberg-Hodge are experts on climate change, localization, and sustainability. Their past lectures have been almost prophetic in their accuracy, and their ideas are more relevant now than ever.

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels.

An author, educator, editor, and lecturer, he has spoken widely on energy and climate issues to audiences in 14 countries, addressing policy makers at many levels, from local city officials to members of the European Parliament. He has been quoted and interviewed countless times for print, television, and radio and has appeared in many film and television documentaries. Heinberg’s Museletter has provided a monthly exploration of current events and the world of  ideas. Its essays present an inter-disciplinary study of history and culture.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures/International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) and The International Alliance for Localization (IAL). Based in the US and UK, with subsidiaries in Germany and Australia, Local Futures examines the root causes of our current social and environmental crises while promoting more sustainable and equitable patterns of living in both North and South. Its mission is to protect and renew well-being by promoting a systemic shift away from economic globalization toward localization.

The Earth Journal counted Norberg-Hodge among the world’s ten most interesting environmentalists, and in Carl McDaniel’s book Wisdom for a Liveable Planet she was profiled as one of eight visionaries changing the world. The Post Growth Institute counted her on the (En)Rich List of 100 people “whose collective contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”