Energy, Environment and Sustainability
To download a PDF profiling some of these authors click here. | Mia Birk
Author, Visionary, Sustainable Transportation Pioneer
Urban planner and bicycling and pedestrian transportation advocate Mia Birk used a shoestring budget to help turn Portland, Oregon into America’s #1 cycling city. She documents the crusade to integrate bicycling into daily life in her book Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet. With over 20 years of experience with pedestrian, bicycle, trail, and greenway planning design and implementation, Birk’s message is the educated, can-do antidote to the doom-and-gloom that often seems a staple of the debate over our planet’s environmental dilemmas. Mia Birk is Chief Executive Officer and Principal at the international firm Alta Planning and Design and an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University.
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 | Dr. Brian Fagan
Author │ Archaeologist │ Climate Change Historian
A leading authority on the complex relationships between the environment, climate change, and human society, Fagan places today’s highly publicized climate crisis in a crucial historical context. In bestselling books like The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations and Elixir: Humans and the History of Water, Fagan describes how humans have adapted to environmental change over the eons. His next book, The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present and Future of Rising Sea Levels (2013), will show how societies of the past adapted to rising waters and how the rising sea levels of today impact the lives of millions of city dwellers and farmers around the world. In addition to climate change and humanity’s relationship to natural resources, Dr. Fagan’s lecture repertoire also includes natural history and the development of human society. Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1967.
Selected Books: The Attacking Ocean, Elixir, The Great Warming
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 | Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon
Author │ Energy & Security Expert │ Political Scientist
A leading expert on the intricate links between nature, technology, and society, Thomas Homer-Dixon is the editor of Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future, a collection of six essays by top international experts in economics, geology, politics, and science. He is the author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, which was a #1 best-seller in Canada, a Globe and Mail Top 100 pick, and the winner of the 2006 National Business Book Award, along with The Ingenuity Gap and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. In uncomplicated language, Homer-Dixon shows how challenges such as global warming, energy scarcity, economic instability, and infoglut affect us and challenges audiences to consider new ways in which we can adapt and prosper in a world of ever-greater complexity and interdependence.
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 front.jpg) | James Howard Kunstler
Novelist │Urban Planning Advocate │Journalist │Social Critic
The author of eight novels and countless articles and essays, Kunstler is best known for his now-classic works in the literature of urban planning and suburban critique: The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. His more recent writings on sustainability and the environment include The Long Emergency, which explores issues of social change, community design and the economics of sustainability through the lens of increasing energy costs and natural resource depletion, and Too Much Magic, which analyzes the various technologies being suggested as magic bullets to the energy crisis. With vision, clarity and a pragmatic worldview, he argues that the time for magical thinking is over and the time to roll up our sleeves and get to work with our neighbors is at hand. Publisher’s Weekly says, “With characteristic curmudgeonly enthusiasm, Kunstler brilliantly if belligerently shows us what a pickle we’re in and how inept we are at dealing with it.” Mr. Kunstler has delivered incisive lectures (which he aptly describes as “stand-up comedy with dark moments”) about urban design, energy issues and new economics to audiences across North America, Australia, Europe and Africa.
Selected Books: Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic
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 | Jeff Goodell
Author │ Investigative Journalist │ Energy & Environment Expert
“The greatest danger we face is not technological hubris, but human apathy.”
—Jeff Goodell
Acclaimed environmental author, investigative journalist, and coal-industry expert (Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future), Jeff Goodell trains his eye on the emergent field of geoengineering in his next book, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix the Earth’s Climate (2010). Goodell is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and his articles appear regularly in the New York Times Magazine and Yale University’s Environment 360. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith, based on the experience of the Quecreek miners. Big Coal is the subject of a feature documentary called Dirty Business.
Selected Books: Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet
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