Earth At Risk! - The Conference & The Concept!

[Peter Lemkin]

Derrick Jensen is the acclaimed author of fifteen books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. His writing has been described as “breaking and mending the reader’s heart” (Publishers Weekly). He holds a degree in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, a degree in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines, and has taught at Eastern Washington University and Pelican Bay State Prison. He has packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores across the nation, stirring them with revolutionary spirit. Read his opening remarks.

William R. Catton, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Washington Stete University. After World War II service in the U.S. Navy, he majored in history at Oberlin College, married an Oberlin classmate, and earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Washington. He has published more than a hundred journal articles and contributed book chapters, plus several dozen book reviews. He is the author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, as well as Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse.

Jane Caputi is a Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She has written three books, all against patriarchal domination: The Age of Sex Crime, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture, and collaborated on Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language with Mary Daly. She also has made a short documentary film, The Pornography of Everyday Life and is now working on a new one, Green Consciousness: Re-Attachment to the Mother/Earth.

Riki Ott, PhD, is a community activist, a former commercial salmon "fisherm'am," and has a degree in marine toxicology with a specialty in oil pollution. She experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill—and chose to do something about it.
She is the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and Not One Drop: Promises, Betrayal, and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Chelsea Green, 2008). She is also the founder of three nonprofit organizations that deal with lingering harm from man-made environmental disaster.

Nora Barrows-Friedman is an award-winning independent journalist specializing on the situation in occupied Palestine, traveling there several times a year for in-depth reporting from the ground in the West Bank and Gaza strip. She was the Senior Producer and co-host of Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio from 2003-2010, and is now a staff correspondent with the Electronic Intifada, an independent online news and analysis publication committed to comprehensive public education on the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel's
decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories. Nora also writes regularly for al-Jazeera English, Inter Press Service, Truthout.org, Left Turn Magazine, and many others.


Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College. She is a long time feminist activist who has been organizing against the pornography industry for over two decades. She has written widely on the effects of pornography on women and men, and has worked with numerous anti-violence organizations to develop educational programs. She is co-founder of the group Stop Porn Culture, an activist organization dedicated to raising awareness about the harms of pornography. For her book Gender, Race and Class in Media she received the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Her new book, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality was published in July 2010.

Thomas Linzey, Esq, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Third, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is a co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School – now taught in twenty-four states across the country – which assists groups to create new community campaigns which elevate the rights of those communities over rights claimed by corporations. Linzey is the recent author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs-Smith 2009), and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country.

Lierre Keith is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well as a work of nonfiction, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (2009, PM Press), which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is co-author with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay of the forthcoming book, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy To Save The Planet.

Waziyatawin is a Dakota writer, teacher, and activist committed to the liberation of Indigenous Peoples and homelands. She is the author or co/editor of five volumes, including For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook and What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland. Her current research interests include the topics of Indigenous women and resistance, how to theorize and practice decolonizing strategies of resistance and resurgence, and Indigenous Peoples and global collapse. Waziyatawin currently holds the Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. When she is not in British Columbia, she is in her home community of Pezihutazizi K’api Makoce (The Land Where They Dig For Yellow Medicine) in the beautiful Minnesota River Valley.