Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva, physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocate, is the Director of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. She serves as an ecology advisor to several organizations including the Third World Network and the Asia Pacific People's Environment Network. 

In 1993 she was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize". A contributing editor to People-Centered Development Forum, she has also written several works include, Staying Alive, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Monoculutures of the Mind and Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Soil Not OIl: Environmental Justice in Age of Climate Crisis.

View Video Clips of Dr. Shiva Speaking:  IFOAM 2007 World Conference,  News Commentary on Global Food Crisis June 2008.

Paul Roberts

A journalist since 1983, Paul Roberts writes and lectures frequently on the complex interplay of economics, technology, and the natural world. Roberts has also written for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The (UK) Guardian and has appeared in Slate, USA Today, The New Republic, Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone, and Outside magazine.  The End of Food follows the successful publication of Roberts's first book, The End of Oil, published in 2004.

Roberts was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (1999) and for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2005. A long-time observer of energy issues and politics, Roberts appears regularly on national and international television and radio news shows, including CNN’s Lou Dobbs, the BBC, PBS NewsHour, MSNBC, CBS Evening News, and on NPR’s Morning Edition, On Point, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air. He lives in Washington State.

View Video Clips of Paul Roberts Speaking: USBC Technology Management Program, World Affairs Council- Food Energy and The Future.

Claire Hope Cummings

Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, March 2008). Claire’s stories focus on the environmental and political implications of how we eat and how food and farming reconnects us to each other and the places where we live.

Claire brings three decades of broad experience in agriculture to her work. She has farmed in California and in Vietnam, where she had an organic farm on the Mekong Delta. For four years she was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel.

For the last 15 years, Claire has been active in the local food and farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping to found the Marin County food policy council, and serving on the boards of organizations such as Earth Island Institute, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Food First, and the Elmwood Institute—the predecessor organization for the Center for Ecoliteracy. Claire was awarded a Food and Society Policy Fellowship in 2001. She currently advises The Columbia Foundation’s sustainable communities and food system programs.

View Webcast with Claire: Hawaii Island Food Summit 2007