New Economics Institute


	Peter Barnes	Peter Barnes is an entrepreneur and writer, co-founder of the Tomales Bay Institute and member of On the Commons. Barnes grew up in New York City and earned a B.A. in history from Harvard and an M.A. in government from Georgetown. He began his career as a reporter on The Lowell Sun (Massachusetts), and was subsequently a Washington correspondent for Newsweek and west coast correspondent for The New Republic. In 1976 he co-founded a worker-owned solar energy company in San Francisco, and in 1983 he co- founded Working Assets Money Fund. He subsequently served as president of Working Assets Long Distance. In 1995 he was named Socially Responsible Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. He has served on numerous boards of directors, including the National Cooperative Bank, the California State Assistance Fund for Energy, the California Solar Industry Association, Businesses for Social Responsibility, the Rainbow Workers Cooperative, Techmar, Redefining Progress, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, Public Media Center, TV-Turnoff Network, the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, Greenpeace International, the California Tax Reform Association, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His books include Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen-Soldier (Knopf, 1972), The People’s Land (Rodale, 1975), Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism (Island Press, 2001), and Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (2006). His articles have appeared in The Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, The American Prospect, the Utne Reader, Yes!, Resurgence and elsewhere. In 1997 he founded the Mesa Refuge, a writers’ retreat in northern California. He has two sons, Zachary and Eli; a partner, Cornelia Durrant; and a dog, Smokey. Read Peter Barnes' E. F. Schumacher Lecture.
	Merrian Goggio Borgeson	Merrian Goggio Borgeson (formerly Merrian Fuller) works for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she focuses on the financing and deployment of energy efficiency and clean energy technologies. She has worked with the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab (RAEL), the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, the California Public Utilities Commission, and SunPower Corporation. She is a past co-chair of the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC) and founding chair of the UC Berkeley Energy Symposium. Merrian was also the managing director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), a non-profit that supports local business networks that are committed to improving the social, environmental, and economic vitality of their communities. She is currently the board chair of BALLE and president of the Goggio Family Foundation. Merrian has an MBA from the Haas School of Business, a Masters in Energy & Resources from UC Berkeley, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford University.
	Bill McKibben	Bill McKibben, a well known environmental author and activist, is the founder of 350.org, an international climate change campaign. 350.org is named for the safe level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. This October 24, Bill and 350.org are coordinating an International Day of Climate Action to call for a strong climate treaty that meets the 350 target. When he's not busy organizing, Bill is an active writer on the climate crisis and other environmental issues. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book to warn the general public about the threat of global warming. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.
	Otto Scharmer	Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT, the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, and a founding member of the MIT Green Hub. Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and governments in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning business leadership programs for client firms including Daimler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Fujitsu, and Google. He also facilitates cross-sector programs for leaders in business, government, and civil society that focus on building people’s collective capacity to achieve profound innovation and change. Scharmer holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University in Germany. He introduced the theoretical framework and practice called “presencing” in his book Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (2007), and in Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (2005), co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. With his colleagues, Scharmer has used presencing to facilitate profound innovation and change processes both within companies and across societal systems.
	Doug Tompkins	Doug Tompkins founded and has been president of the Conservation Land Trust since 1992 and of the Foundation for Deep Ecology since 1990. He also founded the California Mountain Guide Service (1963); The North Face, a mountaineering retail store (1964); a documentary films company (1967); and co-founded the sportswear company Esprit (1970). He directed the publication of seven books of large, photographic format, including Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry; Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West; and Amish: the Art of Tapestry. Climber, skier, kayaker, pilot, and overall sports aficionado, Doug has been a long-time champion of the conservation of wild areas. He lives in South America with his wife Kris.
	Robert Wade	Robert Wade is Professor of Political Economy at The London School of Economics, and winner of the Leontief Prize in Economics 2008. A New Zealander, educated in Washington DC, New Zealand, and at Sussex University, he has worked at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex (1972-95), the World Bank (1984-88), Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School (1989/90), MIT's Sloan School ( 1992), and Brown University (1996-2000). His associations have included Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1992/93), the Russell Sage Foundation (1997/98), the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (2000/01). He has carried out fieldwork on Pitcairn Island, in Italy, India, Korea, and Taiwan. His research on World Bank began in 1995 and continues. Wade is the author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (1990, 2003). The latter won the American Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.