350 Messengers

Bill McKibben is a co-founder and director of 350.org. He is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change.

Bianca Jagger is a prominent international human rights advocate. She is the Council of Europe’s Goodwill Ambassador, Chair of the World Future Council and founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. For approximately 25 years, Bianca Jagger has campaigned for human rights, social and economic justice and environmental protection throughout the world.

Dr. James Hansen heads the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City, which is a division of Goddard Space Flight Center's (Greenbelt, MD), Earth Sciences Directorate. He was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. His early research on the properties of clouds of Venus led to their identification as sulfuric acid. Since the late 1970s, he has worked on studies and computer simulations of the Earth's climate, for the purpose of understanding the human impact on global climate. Dr. Hansen is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. Dr. Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and he received the prestigious Heinz Environment Award for his research on global warming in 2001.

Alex Steffen has been the Executive Editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organization in 2003, as the next phase in a lifetime of work exploring ways of building a better future.

Van Jones is working to combine solutions to America's two biggest problems: social inequality and environmental destruction. In 2007, he founded Green For All, a new organization working to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

Mathis is co-creator of the Ecological Footprint and has worked on sustainability issues for organizations in Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia and Australia, and has lectured for community groups, governments and their agencies, NGOs, and academic audiences at more than 100 universities around the world.

Ms. Thompson has become one of the recognized leaders on environmental issues of the Small Island Developing States. During her time as Minister of Energy and the Environment of Barbados, she enacted a range of progressive policies for sustainable development and environmental protection. She also became a key voice to raise awareness of global warming in Barbados - a country where the challenges of climate change and conservation are of particular relevance.

David T. Suzuki PhD, co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster in Canada. David has received consistently high acclaim for his 30 years of award-winning work in broadcasting, explaining the complexities of science in a compelling, easily understood way. He is well known to millions as the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science television series, The Nature of Things.

Born in India in 1952, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Shiva has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, genetic engineering are among the fields where she has contributed intellectually and through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement.

As a child, Aridjis would often walk up a hillside near his home to watch the migrating monarch butterflies. As he grew older logging thinned the forest. This and other events in his life caused him to co-found the Grupo de los Cien, the Group of 100, an association of one hundred artists and intellectuals that became heavily involved in trying to draw attention to and solve environmental problems in Mexico. Aridjis has published 38 books of poetry and prose, many of them translated into a dozen languages.

Desmond Tutu was Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 until 1996 and is the 1984 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. Since his retirement, Tutu has continued to work as a global activist on issues pertaining to democracy, freedom and human rights.

Paul Loeb is an American social and political activist, who has strongly fought for issues including social justice, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and civic involvement in American democracy. Loeb is a frequent public speaker and has written five books and numerous newspaper editorials.

Barbara Kingsolver's twelve books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. Translated into more than 20 languages, Kingsolver's work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, co-written with her husband Steven L. Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver, claimed the 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Award for nonfiction.

Hermann Scheer has been a member of the German Parliament since 1980, and currently serves as President of EUROSOLAR - The European Association for Renewable Energy. He is the
General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE), and is also an author, policy innovator and global leader in the field of renewable energy.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a Canadian Inuit activist. She has been a political representative for Inuit at the regional, national and international levels, most recently as International Chair for Inuit Circumpolar Council (formerly the Inuit Circumpolar Conference). Watt-Cloutier has worked on a range of social and environmental issues affecting Inuit, and has most recently focused on persistent organic pollutants and global climate change. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, and has been featured in a number of documentaries and profiled by journalists from all media.

Renowned polar explorer Will Steger has launched Global Warming 101--a series of educational polar expeditions to the High Arctic and Antarctica led by Steger and dynamic young explorers from around the globe. The teams will travel by dogsled and kite ski to the front-lines of global warming at the farthest reaches of the planet.

Deepa is a co-founder of the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN), a movement aimed to mobilize youth across India into taking action against climate change. IYCN has seen growth from 3 to over 205,000 people within 4 months of its initiation. Her other work has involved being the Indian Coordinator for the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), the peak youth body on climate change in Australia, and also drove AYCC’s faith climate campaign, strongly engaging youth from Hindu, Christian and Islamic backgrounds.

Ross Gelbspan is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of a number of influential books on global warming, including The Heat is On and Boiling Point. The latter book received the lead review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, which was written by former Vice President Al Gore. It was also honored as one of the best science books of 2004 by Discover Magazine. Ross is also an influential leader in the United States climate movement and a respected educator and speaker.

Keibo Oiwa (Japanese pen Name:Tsuji Shin'ichi) is a cultural anthropologist, author, environmentalist, and public speaker. He lived in North America for fifteen years and holds a ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornel University. The founder of the Sloth Club, Japan's leading 'Slow Life' environmental group, he is in frequent demand for lecture and consultation throughout in Japan.

Dr. Woodwell is an ecologist with broad interests in global environmental issues and policies. Prior to founding the Woods Hole Research Center, he was founder and director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratories. He was also a founding trustee and is vice chairman of the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is a former chairman of the board of trustees and currently a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund, a founding trustee of the World Resources Institute, a founder and currently an honorary member of the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former president of the Ecological Society of America. Dr. Woodwell is the author of more than 300 major papers and books in ecology.

Claudio Angelo is one of the principle science communicators in Brazil and has been writing about climate change for almost a decade.  He is the Science Editor at the Folha de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s most prominent newspapers, and his book “Global Warming” is one of the first (and few) popular books about the subject in the country.