October 18th-20th
Marin Center in San Rafael, CA
2019 Keynote Speakers
Stay tuned for more along with 150+ afternoon speakers
Founder | Revolutionary Love Project
Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action.
Founder | 350.org
Bill McKibben, our nation’s most significant environmental activist, is also a leading journalist, author and academic. A Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, Bill’s The End of Nature (1989) was the first book for a general audience about climate change. A founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, he has won slews of prestigious awards, including the Right Livelihood Award and the Gandhi Prize and Thomas Merton prizes.
Executive Director | Sunrise Movement
Varshini Prakash is the Executive Director and co-founder of Sunrise, a movement of young people “working to stop climate change, take back our democracy from Big Oil, and elect leaders who will fight for our generation's health and wellbeing.”
Founder | V-Day
Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages.
Executive Director | Honor the Earth
Winona LaDuke, one of North America’s most renowned Indigenous rights and environmental leaders for decades, is a rural development economist working on issues of Indigenous economics and food and energy policy who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota.
Author
Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska.
Founder | Project Drawdown
Paul Hawken, one of the most important environmental authors, activists, thinkers and entrepreneurs of our era, has dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His many bestselling books include such massively influential texts as: The Next Economy; The Ecology of Commerce; Blessed Unrest; and most recently, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
Co-Director | Cooperation Jackson
Kali Akuno, an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice, is the co-founder and Co-Director of Jackson, Mississippi’s groundbreaking local economic development initiative, Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions fighting to create economic democracy and a vibrant solidarity economy to help transform Mississippi and the South.
CEO | Mother Jones
Monika Bauerlein is CEO of Mother Jones, the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 2017 Magazine of the Year. Previously, she served as co-editor with Clara Jeffery, who is now editor-in-chief. Together, they spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by tenfold growth in audience and newsroom staff.
| Sacred Circles Center
Jerry Tello of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses.
Director of Green Strategy | Data for Progress
Julian Brave NoiseCat, Director of Green Strategy at the think tank, Data for Progress, and “Narrative Change Director” for the Natural History Museum artist and activist collective, is also a correspondent for Real America with Jorge Ramos and a Contributing Editor at Canadian Geographic.
Co-Founder | Utah Youth Environmental Solutions
Mishka Banuri is an 18-year-old organizer from Salt Lake City, Utah. After moving to Utah from a suburb in Chicago, she fell in love with the Colorado Plateau's mountains and red rock. She has been politically active since 7th grade, holding statewide organizations, institutions, and politicians accountable for their actions on climate and social issues.
Professor | Oberlin College
David W. Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics (Emeritus) at Oberlin College, is a pioneering, award-winning thought leader in the fields of Sustainability and Ecological Literacy. The author and co-author of countless articles and papers and several seminal books, including, most recently, Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency, he has served as a board member or adviser to many foundations and organizations (including Bioneers!). His current work is on the state of our democracy.
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