About the Speakers

Richard Heinberg is the author of eight books including The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003, 2005), Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, 2004), The Oil Depletion Protocol (New Society, 2006), and Peak Everything (New Society, 2007). He is a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost Peak Oil educators. He writes a regular column for The Ecologist, and has also authored scores of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, Z Magazine, Resurgence, The Futurist, European Business Review, Earth Island Journal, Alternative Press Review, and The Sun; and on web sites such as Alternet.org, EnergyBulletin.net, GlobalPublicMedia.com, ProjectCensored.com, and Counterpunch.com. He has appeared in numerous video documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour.

Dan Bednarz, PhD, a Sociologist, is building a consortium among public health and health care stakeholders and actors to address the Bottleneck of ecological crises facing medicine and public health. He has worked in academic public health, spending three years as the Associate Director of the Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Pittsburgh. He has lectured at the university level in business strategy, organizational studies, sociology, and policy analysis; worked as a craftsman; and also instructed English in East Berlin after the unification of Germany. He has written extensively on preventive and treatment medicine in a post-petroleum world and on the need to view energy, climate change, water, food, and so on, as aspects of the molar problem of how humanity is a part of the earth’s ecology.

He holds a BA and MA in sociology from Central Michigan University and did graduate work in sociology at Vanderbilt University. His PhD is in policy analysis from The Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Jill Stein is a board certified internist, and previously served as a staff physician at Harvard Community Health Plan and Simmons College Health Center. She was also an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School for over 20 years. She co-authored the report, In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, (GBPSR 2000), a call to action to protect children from toxic exposures that contribute to learning and behavior problems. The report has been the basis of continuing education conferences at medical centers across the country, and has been translated into four languages. As a leader in Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the founder of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, Dr. Stein has been a voice for the health of communities, assisting citizen groups seeking better protections from pollution and improved environmental and social conditions for health at the community, state and federal level. She has appeared on the Today Show, 20/20 News Magazine and other media to discuss the health effects of toxic threats. Dr. Stein is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and Harvard College.