Nina Wise
has been described by a New York Times columnist as “a metaphysical vaudevillian for the new millennium.” Wise has invented a compelling form of physical autobiographical theater called Motion Theater. Her unique performances thoroughly integrate movement and narrative in a seamless unfolding that brings one to tears, laughter and deep sighs of recognition about the human condition. Audience members and critics alike comment that they have not seen anything quite like Wise’s work before and are driven to blended comparisons—Martha Graham mixed with Robinson Jeffers, Lily Tomlin mixed with Jules Feiffer—and use words like “fresh,” “moving,” and “deeply human.” Ms Wise is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the Marin Arts Council, and her performance works have been honored with seven Bay Area Theater Critics’ Circle Awards. Her book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life, was published by Broadway Books in 2002 and her stories and articles have been published in numerous anthologies and journals.

Randy Hayes
is the founder of the Rainforest Action Network and the ED of the International Forum on Globalization. Known as one of the country’s leading activists, he has helped shape environmental policies for the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, as well as been a key player in helping to reform the policies of corporations from Mitsubishi to Citibank to Home Depot to be more eco-responsible.

Michael Lerner
is president of Commonweal, the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and co-founder of Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which was featured in Bill Moyer's award-winning PBS series "Healing and the Mind." He is the author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer. Lerner has been exploring the interface of mind-body health and environmental health—of personal healing and healing the earth—for thirty years. Widely considered a dynamic speaker with a human touch, Lerner addresses a broad range of issues about health, healing, the environment and spirituality.

Carolyn Raffensperger
is executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, www.sehn.org, which is known for its work on the Precautionary Principle. As an environmental lawyer she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Carolyn is co-editor of Precautionary Tools for Reshaping Environmental Policy and Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle. She coined the term “ecological medicine” to encompass the broad notions that both health and healing are entwined with the natural world. Carolyn has been featured in Gourmet magazine, the Utne Reader, Yes! Magazine, the Sun, Whole Earth, and Scientific American. Along with leading workshops and giving frequent lectures on the Precautionary Principle, Carolyn is at the forefront of developing new models for government that depend on these larger ideas of precaution and ecological integrity. The new models include guardianship for future generations, a vision for the courts of the 21st century and the public trust doctrine.

Charlotte Brody, R.N.
is the executive director of Commonweal, a nonprofit health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California. Founded in 1976, Commonweal conducts programs that contribute to human and ecosystem health—to a safer world for people and for all life. Before serving as Commonweal's Executive Director, Brody was the Executive Director of Health Care Without Harm: The Campaign for Environmentally Responsible Health Care. She is an inspiring and deeply moving speaker.

Rupert Sheldrake
is one of the world’s most innovative biologists. He is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. He first worked in developmental biology at Cambridge University, and is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project. He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US.

Hazel Henderson
is the author of Building A Win-Win World, Paradigms in Progress, Creating Alternative Futures, The Politics of The Solar Age, and Redefining Wealth & Progress. She is a world-wide syndicated columnist and consultant on sustainable development. Henderson rejects the inevitability of global competition. Moreover, she proposes that our future will be far better if cooperative approaches to dealing with human needs were to replace the destructive aspects of competition. She finds particular hope in the trend toward a "grassroots globalism" being created by countless social movements around the world that deal with poverty, social inequities, pollution, resource-depletion, violence and more. She believes these movements are leading us toward the creation of a win-win world in which the rewards will go to the ethical and caring.

Judy Wicks
is owner and founder of Philadelphia’s 24-year-old White Dog Cafe, and is a national leader in the local, living economies movement. She is co-founder and co-chair of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). She is also president of the White Dog Community Enterprises (formerly White Dog Cafe Foundation), a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region. Judy has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Business Enterprise Trust award, founded by Norman Lear, for creative leadership in combining sound business management with social vision. More recently, she received Business Ethics Magazine’s first “Living Economy Award,” and the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year, 2005. Other accolades include American Benefactor’s “America’s 25 Most Generous Companies,” Oprah Magazine’s “5 Amazingly Gifted and Giving Food Professionals,” and Inc. Magazine's 25 favorite entrepreneurs in the country. Judy co-authored The White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Restaurant, and is currently working on a book about her business and the local living economy movement to be published by Chelsea Green.

Jane Hirshfield
is an award-winning poet. She was born in New York City and received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's first graduating class to include women. Her books of poetry include After, Given Sugar, Given Salt (which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya. She is the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. About her work, the poet Rosanna Warren has said: "Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind.” Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Susan Griffin
is a poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she spent as a child in the High Sierras and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness. Her work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception, as she draws connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both private and public life. She is known for her innovative style. Her groundbreaking book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War, blends history and memoir as does Wrestling with Angel of democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen, a work in progress (to be published by Trumpeter books in the Spring of 2008) that explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains democracy.

Wendy Johnson
is a lay Dharma teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh. Wendy has lived and practiced at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California since 1975. Practicing engaged Buddhism, Wendy combines her 30-year training in organic agriculture with a commitment to teaching meditation engaged with the life of the world. Her Buddhist philosophy is the inspirational force behind her work leading walks, practicing organic gardening and teaching. She has been involved for many years in establishing gardening programs in Bay Area schools. She is completing a book on Zen practice and gardening to be published by Bantam Press.

Joan Halifax
is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has worked in the area of death and dying for over thirty years and is Director of the Project on Being with Dying. For the past twenty-five years, she has been active in environmental work. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on engaged Buddhism. In May, 2005 she became a Spiritual Director, in Training with Roshis Bernie Glassman and Pat Enkyo O'Hara, of the Zen Peacemakers. She is Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is founder of the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University, and has taught in many universities, monasteries, and medical centers around the world.

Natalie Goldberg
an author and teacher of creative writing. She is the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World, is about painting as a second art form. Her lively watercolors are exhibited at Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Natalie has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops and she has a reputation as a great teacher. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on Spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation. She currently lives in Northern New Mexico.