PIERRE SOKOLSKY

PIERRE SOKOLSKY

/

Leader in field of Particle Astrophysics
Professor Emeritus of Physics & Astronomy U of Utah
Dean Emeritus of the College of Science

As an administrator for 15 years, I still tried to do science and it was difficult because being a dean, every day there is a problem. Every day you have to solve some personal issues, so it’s difficult to concentrate and what I would do was, whenever there was an opportunity to go to a conference away from the university, particularly in a different country, I would sit in the conference room listening to these lectures. You know how it is with meetings, maybe 10% of the speakers are exciting and interesting. What I found is even when I was not listening because I was in this atmosphere of people talking about physics, my mind was set free and would just start percolating. And all of a sudden ideas would come completely unrelated to what the speaker was talking about, except that they were scientific ideas. And I would jot them down and I found that this was really quite an interesting process because it was kind of an immersion process where you actually are not concentrating on what is exactly in front of you, but it puts you in this mood. The brain turns on a different lode and I think by association other ideas come up.

MITCH HOROWITZ

MITCH HOROWITZ

/

Historian of Alternative Spirituality & PEN Award-Winning Author

I’ve always considered myself a believing historian and, in fact, most historians of religion are actually believing historians. Very frequently they emerge from the congregations that they’re writing about, whether new religious movements or traditional religions, this is true of Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem, it’s true of people who have written probably the most important biographies of more recent religious figures like Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith, a Mormon prophet. Although, historians don’t frequently acknowledge being believing historians because they feel that it might seem to compromise their capacity for critical judgement, but my impression is different. My impression is that being in very direct proximity to the nature of the philosophical, religious, ethical, therapeutic movements that you’re writing about can heighten your critical acumen.

ROWIN SNIJDER

ROWIN SNIJDER

/

Founder of Le Compostier, Creator of “Worm Hotels” for Community Composting

Know first of all that we are not separate from nature, but that we are part of it. To not even think of what is the benefit for me from it. I find it a very beautiful the concept of the food forest. Like you're actually building soil, and then the surplus is that you get some food back. To focus more on giving than on taking, especially for children.

What I like to teach my children–really look at what is your talent, what drives you and how you think you can use that to improve and to create more harmony. I think is very important. Do not think so much about what others expect from you, but what is really driving you? I think that's very important to find out and go for it.

IAN SEABROOK

IAN SEABROOK

/

Award-Winning Underwater Director of Photography

It’s about leaving the planet in a better condition than it is currently. What you’re witnessing is years of neglect. It’s the humans who have screwed it all up, and the warming of the earth is no different. The oceans are changing. The topography is changing. Mussels are being fried when the tides recede. This is all unnatural. Or maybe it’s natural. I think it’s Mother Nature just being pissed off and saying, “This is what you get.” And so it’s up to everyone to change their ways. Their shopping habits, their eating habits, how much gas they use. All that stuff which people think “that can’t affect anything.” Well, you’re seeing the result of it now.

RON GONEN

RON GONEN

/

Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners
Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC

We live in buildings and cities because that’s what generates a living for a lot of people, but where we’re most comfortable as humans is when we’re in nature. Your generation owns this. Don’t let anybody take it from you or damage it because you own it. The next generation is the one that owns it and view it with a sense of ownership and a sense of pride and a sense of protection because there are a lot of benefits you get from nature.


MICOL HEBRON

MICOL HEBRON

/

Interdisciplinary Artist, Curator & Feminist Activist

Now I think we’re in another culture war. I think we’re in, as we see the realm of cancel culture in social media and this very polarising war between the liberal left and the conservative right. I think that we’re in another culture and a lot of it is centering around gender and race. If you look at what’s happened to black women athletes in the last couples of months, the censuring of their bodies either because of hormones in the case of Caster Semenya or Naomi Osaka, there’s a lot of ways that our society has found to police black bodies for being too exceptional in a lot of ways. For performing in exceptional ways, and the white patriarchy doesn’t like to see that because it starts to diminish their power.


MARGE PIERCY

MARGE PIERCY

/

Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

JASON W. MOORE

JASON W. MOORE

/

Environmental Historian, Historical Geographer & Professor of Sociology · Binghamton University

We’re not waiting for the disasters to happen. They have happened. They are happening, and the disasters aren’t natural. They involve climate, but the disasters are very much made by the conditions of capitalist accumulation. We are not going to be able to grapple with the challenges of planetary crisis with the thinking that created planetary crisis.


ALICE BROOKS

ALICE BROOKS

/

Award-winning Cinematographer
In The Heights, Tick, Tick…Boom!

There’s this children’s book called Miss Rumphius, and I’ve carried it around with me my entire life. It’s about a woman whose grandfather tells her three things, and the last one is the most difficult thing of all and that’s to fill the world with beauty. And I give this book to every one of my friends who are having babies, I have a copy with me almost at all times, and I’m reminded of that feeling that Jonathan Larson had in Tick, Tick…Boom! Of how much time do we have to do something great.

ROBERT DICK

ROBERT DICK

/

Award-winning Flutist, Composer, Teacher & Author

I decided that I wanted to explore the flute. I mean really explore the flute. People had known a few multi-phonics where you could play two notes. But they had been basically “special effects”, sort of sprinkled into a traditional line to spice it up. And I thought, why not just go the whole way? So my concept that first of all music is made by people. All art is made by people. Music is not made by instruments. The sound of the flute is silence. The sound of the piano is silence. The mark of a brush is a white canvas until the person makes the mark. So music comes from people. We use instruments.

TEMA STAIG & ALLISON VANORE

TEMA STAIG & ALLISON VANORE

/

Tema Staig · Women in Media Executive Director & Art Director
Allison Vanore · WIM Secretary & Emmy-Winning Producer of After Forever

I started Women in Media in 2010 as a sort of community group. We talked about women above and below the line because there weren’t any organizations or conversations really happening about women in the below the line positions, meaning women in the crew who are in the camera, art, grip and electronics departments. There were only conversations happening about more women directors and, being a scenic artist and production designer, I knew that there are so many women in the crew and there’s only one director. So if we only aimed for one, we would never get to parity and there would never be room like myself who wanted to advance from these crew positions.

CRAIG KAUFFMAN

CRAIG KAUFFMAN

/

Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon
Member of the United Nations Knowledge Network on Harmony with Nature

The term Rights of Nature tends to be applied to two different things. One is this underlying legal philosophy that is actually broader than just Rights of Nature, that’s probably better understood as ecological jurisprudence that may or may not be expressed in terms of rights, but because Rights of Nature is getting a lot of attention that term tends to be applied to represent this broader underlying philosophy. Of course, the other way it’s used it to refer to the legal provisions that explicitly recognize Rights for ecosystems.

DONALD ROBERTSON

DONALD ROBERTSON

/

Writer, Cognitive-Behavioural Psychotherapist
Author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
President of Plato’s Academy Centre

At first when I began writing these books, people told me that they didn’t think there was an audience for them. They thought it was a kind of niche subject, nobody was really that interested in it. And then gradually it became clear that there’s a surprisingly big audience of people, that really have a craving for Classical wisdom and are interested in history, in the relationship between history and self-improvement and philosophy and psychotherapy.

ELIZABETH KARCHER

ELIZABETH KARCHER

/

Executive Director of the President Wilson House in Washington, D.C.


I have three missions, topics of conversation, ideas for exhibitions and really discussions that we want to bring to life at the House, and those are stories of African-Americans, racial conflict, and social justice, as well as women and women’s stories, suffrage, and finally Wilson’s international legacy and how he was seen after the Great War. I think those three topics are topics that resonate today. So, even though they’re 100 years old and issues that he faced in his Presidency, these are topics that are still relevant. We’re still talking about social and racial justice. We’re still about women being enfranchised and women, not just in the vote, but having positions in Board of Directors, museums, companies, and corporations across the United States.

PETER SUTORIS

PETER SUTORIS

/

Anthropologist, Educator, Writer & Filmmaker

As a culture, how do we approach the environment? How do we approach the planet? Within our education systems are we emphasizing our arrogance? Or are we emphasizing our humility in the face of planetary-scale challenges? I think at the moment, from what I’ve seen in a number of countries, this huge focus on the natural sciences, hard science as a way of mastering nature. And perhaps less of a focus on social sciences, humanities that allow us to reflect a bit more deeply on our relationship more fundamentally with the planet.

MARK MENNIN

MARK MENNIN

/

Sculptor

I think direct contact with the material should be important to every sculptor because I think once you lose that it becomes a second hand process. It’s one of the reasons the casting process isn’t so interesting to me just because the final product, the final piece has not been touched by the artist. There’s no relationship with the mind that conceived the piece or designed it. I think something is lost when that happens. And it becomes something else.

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

/

Sébastien Gokalp · Director of France’s National Museum of Immigration
Curator of Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris & Louis Vuitton Foundation

We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.

ANDERS LEVERMANN

ANDERS LEVERMANN

/

Professor at Physics Institute of Potsdam University
Senior Research Scientist at Earth Institute, Columbia University

A lot of people think climate change is about avoiding the extinction of mankind. In my opinion, climate change is about putting pressure on society and disrupting society to an extent that it can't function properly anymore. So my greatest fear is that if we don't combat climate change, the weather extremes will hit us with a frequency and intensity that we will not be able to recover after each impact. And then we will start to fight with each other.

JON GERTNER

JON GERTNER

/

Journalist & Historian on Science, Technology & Nature

I don’t think there is anything in our history that prepares us for what we have to do next. I think we have a lot of promising signs. It seems like the real work is still ahead of us. To me it feels that we’re making this up as we go along, we’ve made a couple good steps, we know the problem really well. We know what to do or at least what is needed, but those questions of policy and politics and how to mobilise governments and align people, at least to me it seems like the world has gotten more contentious, maybe because of the pandemic, rather than more willing to align.

MELISSA CRISTINA MARQUEZ

MELISSA CRISTINA MARQUEZ

/

Shark Scientist, Science Communicator, TV Presenter & Author

A lot of people when you think of sharks, you think of hammerheads, great white sharks, tiger sharks, but there’s so much more diversity than just that. There’s over 500 different species and on average we’re discovering new species every two weeks, not just of sharks, but also their cousins, the stingrays, skates and sometimes the chimeras as well. And so knowing that diversity exists, for me it’s really important to get that message out there.