2012 Conference Speaker
Gus Speth is a Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont, and Distinguished Senior Fellow with Demos and with the United Nations Foundation, both in New York City. He was Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at Yale where he served as Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from 1999 to 2009. From 1993 to 1999, Speth was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group.
David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Senior Adviser to the President at Oberlin College. He is the author of seven books, including Earth in Mind and Ecological Literacy, and co-editor of three others. The recipient of seven honorary degrees and other national awards, he has served on the Boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and Bioneers.
Richard B. Norgaard is Professor of Energy and Resources at the University of California at Berkeley. Among the founders of the field of ecological economics, his recent research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently, and how globalization affects environmental governance. He has field experience in the Brazilian Amazon, Alaska, and Vietnam with minor forays in other parts of the globe.
Eric Harris-Braun designs and builds software infrastructure for the new economy. He is a co-founder of the MetaCurrency project, which is creating a platform for communities of all scales to design and deploy their own currencies. He works closely with The Collective Intelligence Research Institute, a research and development group dedicated to understanding and developing new forms of collective intelligence.
John Fullerton is the Founder and President of Capital Institute, a collaborative working to transform finance to serve a more just, resilient, and sustainable economic system. Through the work of Capital Institute, his syndicated “Future of Finance” blog on the Capital Institute website, regular public speaking engagements, and university lectures, he has become a recognized thought leader in the New Economy space generally and the financial-system transformation challenge in particular.
Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative and a former Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard and King's College of Cambridge University. He served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and as a Special Assistant working on United Nations matters in the Department of State.
Neva Goodwin is Co-Director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University. She is the lead author of two introductory college-level textbooks: Microeconomics in Context and Macroeconomics in Context, published by M.E. Sharpe. These are the starting points for her endeavor to develop an economic theory— "contextual economics"—that will have more relevance to real-world concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm.
