NCN SALONS

Three worldwide NCN Salons, where where conference goers can interact casually and in real-time, have been scheduled for Saturday, November 5, 2016 (details).

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OPENING TALKS

Opening Remarks

John Foran

John Foran is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at UCSB, teaching courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of alternatives to development and globalization beyond capitalism. His books include Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (2005). He has served as UCSB’s Sustainability Champion, works on the UC Carbon Neutrality 2025 effort, and is co-facilitator of this year’s Critical Issues in America series – Climate Futures: This Changes Everything. His research and activism are now centered within the global climate justice movement, and can be found at the Climate Justice Project [www.climatejusticeproject.com] and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory [www.iicat.org]. He is a member of 350.org, the Green Party of California, and System Change Not Climate Change.

Ken Hiltner

Ken Hiltner is a Professor of the environmental humanities at UCSB. The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI), Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He has published five books, including Milton and Ecology, What Else is Pastoral?, Renaissance Ecology, and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, as well as a range of environmentally oriented articles. Hiltner has served as Director of UCSB’s Literature & Environment Center, its Early Modern Center, the English Department’s graduate program, and as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Prior to becoming a professor, for many years he made his living as a furniture maker. A second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries.

Keynote Talks

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, and activist.  In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming.  He is a co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement. McKibben is 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 Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”

Erik Assadourian

Erik Assadourian is a Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute. Over the past 15 years with Worldwatch, Erik has directed two editions of Vital Signs and five editions of State of the World, including the 2013 edition: Is Sustainability Still Possible? and the upcoming 2017 edition: EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet. Over the years, Erik has written many articles, most of which can be read freely here. Erik also directs Worldwatch’s Transforming Cultures project, and designed Catan: Oil Springs, an eco-educational scenario for the popular board game Settlers of Catan. Over the past few years, Erik has also been working to produce Yardfarmers, a reality TV show that will follow six Millennial Americans as they exit the consumer economy to live with their parents and farm their families’ yards. He is managing editor of the US hub of FUTUREPERFECT, and an adjunct professor at Goucher College.

Margaret Klein Salamon

Margaret Klein Salamon is the Founder and Director of the The Climate Mobilization. Margaret earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University and also holds a BA in social anthropology from Harvard. Though she loved being a therapist, Margaret felt called to apply her psychological and anthropological knowledge to solving climate change. She is the author of the blog The Climate Psychologist.

Wen Stephenson

Wen Stephenson, an independent journalist and climate activist, is a contributor to The Nation and the author of What We’re Fighting For Now is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice (Beacon Press, 2015). Formerly an editor at The Atlantic and the Boston Globe, he has also written about climate, culture, and politics for Slate, the New York Times,Grist, and the Boston Phoenix. As a volunteer activist he helped launch the grassroots network 350 Massachusetts, has been deeply engaged in the Divest Harvard campaign from the outset, and has participated in and supported numerous nonviolent civil disobedience actions.