Chip has been with Orion Magazine since 1992. He served as the magazine's Managing Editor from 1993 until 2003, when he left to become Editor-in-Chief of Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit book publisher. In 2005 he returned to Orion to serve as the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Orion Society. He has been the editor of hundreds of magazine articles, as well as many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Work he has edited has been nominated for or won many awards, including the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Chip also serves as a panelist for several literary awards, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

While the term "green-collar jobs" gains more press and pundits daily, very few people have actually marshaled the resources to get unemployed Americans trained and placed on pathways out of poverty in this growing economic sector. Majora Carter has. Born, raised, and continuing to live in the South Bronx, her work takes her around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and by 2003 had implemented the highly successful Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) program - a pioneering green-collar job training and placement system -- seeding communities with a skilled workforce that has both a personal & economic stake in their urban environment. She is currently president of the green-collar economic consulting firm the Majora Carter Group, LLC. Her vision, drive, and tenacity earned her a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. She started 2007 as one of Newsweek's "25 To Watch", ended the year as one of Essence Magazine's "25 most Influential African Americans", named one of the "50 most influential women in NYC" by the NY Post for the past two years, and "NYC's most influential environmentalist" by the BBC World Service, a board member of The Wilderness Society, and recording a special national public radio series called "The Promised Land" for 2009 release.

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published poet and writer and the author and/or editor of some twenty book titles. He was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians. His award-winning memoir Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, written in the style of Thoreau’s Walden andbased on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina, was published by the University of Georgia Press in the spring of 2005. His work on ecology and the environment has appeared in local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. He has been active as a member of many environmental organizations and movements in his home of western North Carolina. His latest book The End of Eden: Writings of an Environmental Activist was published in the fall of 2008. He currently resides along the Tuckasegee River in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.  

Herman E. Daly is currently Professor at the University of Maryland, School of Public Affairs. Previously, he was at The World Bank, where he was Senior Economist in the Environment Department, helping to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. While there, he was engaged in environmental operations work in Latin America. Before joining the World Bank, Daly was Alumni Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University. He is a co-founder and associate editor of the journal, Ecological Economics. His interest in economic development, population, resources, and environment has resulted in over a hundred articles as well as numerous books, including Steady-State Economics (1977; 1991), Valuing the Earth (1993), Beyond Growth (1996), and Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999). He is co-author with theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. of For the Common Good (1989; 1994) which received the Grawemeyer Award for ideas for improving World Order. He is a recipient of the Honorary Right Livelihood Award (Sweden's alternative to the Nobel Prize), the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Sophie Prize (Norway).

President of The Wilderness Society since 1996, Bill has been active in conservation for over 30 years. As president he leads a staff of 175 headquartered in Washington, DC and nine regional offices, and acts as the key spokesperson and advocate for The Wilderness Society's work on Capitol Hill and across the country. Recognized as a national leader in public land conservation and wilderness preservation, Bill has played an important role in the protection of national forest roadless areas, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and America's national monuments. Since he took the reins of the organization, more than three million acres of wilderness have been added to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Bill is committed to building partnerships and bringing new constituencies into the wilderness movement and believes that helping empower other groups is the key to our own success.

Chuck Nelson was born and raised in Boone County, in Sylvester, W.Va., where he worked for thirty years as an underground coal miner. Chuck became an activist in 1999 after losing his job with Massey Energy because of his fight against the environmental impacts on his town from a Massey Energy coal preparation plant located in Sylvester. He joined Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in 2005 as a volunteer community organizer and board member. He is also a member of Coal River Mountain Watch, the Sludge Safety Committee, and the Alliance for Appalachia. Chuck received the 2008 "Laura Foreman Grassroots Activist of the Year� award from the West Virginia Environmental Council.

Photograph by Matthew Worden

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He is the recipient of four honorary degrees and other awards including The Millennium Leadership Award from Global Green, the Bioneers Award, the National Wildlife Federation Leadership Award, a Lyndhurst Prize acknowledging "persons of exceptional moral character, vision, and energy." He serves as a Trustee for several organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org) and the Aldo Leopold Foundation (www.aldoleopold.org). He is the author of six books and co-editor of three others including Ecological Literacy (SUNY, 1992) and Earth in Mind (1994/2004). In 1987 he organized studies of energy, water, and materials use on several college campuses that helped to launch the green campus movement. In 1996 he organized the effort to design the first substantially green building on a U.S. college campus. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center was later named by the U.S. Department of Energy as "One of Thirty Milestone Buildings in the 20th Century." The story of that building is told in two books: The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002) and Design on the Edge (MIT, 2006). Recent projects include a two year, $2 million project to define a 100 day climate action plan for the Obama administration (www.climateactionproject.com ). He is also active in efforts to stop mountaintop removal in Appalachia and develop a new economy based on ecological restoration and wind energy. He is the author of forthcoming The Transforming Climate: Leadership in the Age of Consequences (2009).

Dr. Thomas C. Peterson is a physical scientist at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC, where he uses historical observations to quantify how the climate has been changing. After earning his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University in 1991, Tom primarily engaged in creating NCDC's global land surface data set used to quantify long-term global climate change. Key areas of his expertise include data archaeology, quality control, homogeneity testing, international data exchange and global climate analysis using both in situ and satellite data. He was a lead author on the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report. Currently he is a member of the Global Climate Observing System Atmospheric Observation Panel for Climate, chairs the United Nation's World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology Open Programme Area Group on Monitoring and Analysis of Climate Variability and Change, and co-chairs the Unified Synthesis Product: Climate Change and the United States: Analysis of the Effects and Projections for the Future. The U.S. Department of Commerce has honored him with three Bronze Medal Awards and one Gold Medal Award. Essential Science Indicators has ranked him as one of the top 1% of scientists in the field of Geosciences based on Journal Citation Reports. He is the author or co-author of over 60 peer-reviewed publications and three data sets.

Writer, naturalist and activist Janisse Ray is author of three books of literary nonfiction. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, published by Milkweed Editions in 1999. Anne Raver of The New York Times said of Janisse Ray, "The forests of the South find their Rachel Carson." The book won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. Ray's second book, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, about rural community, was published by Milkweed Editions in early 2003. The third, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, was published by Chelsea Green in 2005. Ray produced In One Place: The Natural History of a Georgia Farmer by Milton Hopkins, out in 2001. She co-edited, with Susan Cerulean and Laura Newton, Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf (2004). In 2007 Ray started a small press, Wildfire, in order to publish Southern nature writing; an anthology of local stories about a Georgia preserve, Moody Forest, is recently out. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and in 2007 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Unity College in Maine. In 2008 she is on the faculty of Chatham University's low-residency MFA program. She will also teach at Wildbranch Writing Workshop, the Island Institute's Sitka Symposium, and Unity College's workshop for teachers, "Education in a Changing Climate."

Andrew Revkin, a prize-winning reporter and author, has spent a quarter of a century covering subjects ranging from the assault on the Amazon to the Asian tsunami, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. Since 1995, he has been covering the environment for The New York Times, but his first prize-winning magazine articles on the human influence on climate were published more than 20 years ago, before the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has written acclaimed books on the Amazon (1990), global warming (1992), and the changing Arctic (2006). His multimedia work on the Web has also been widely lauded, particularly his New York Times blog, Dot Earth (nytimes.com/dotearth). He is the first science reporter to win a John Chancellor Award for sustained excellence in journalism (2008). When not committing journalism, Andrew Revkin is a performing songwriter, member of the roots-blues band Uncle Wade, and occasional accompanist for Pete Seeger. (myspace.com/unclewade).

Larry Schweiger is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.� He returned to the National Wildlife Federation in March 2004 with a commitment to confront global warming to protect wildlife for our children's future. Previously, he served for eight years as President and CEO of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, where he pioneered watershed restoration and promoted ecological research, land conservation and community outreach in high priority conservation areas. Prior to that, Larry was the Executive Secretary of the Joint House/Senate Conservation Committee for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, Senior Vice President for Conservation Programs at National Wildlife Federation, and 1st Vice President of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Larry currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. He was selected as Pennsylvania's Environmental Professional of the Year in 2002, Pittsburgher of the Year in 2000 and he received a Conservation Service Award from the Christian Environmental Association in September 1995.

The Warriors of AniKituhwa, a Cherokee dance group, have been making history by recreating Cherokee dances described in 1762, including the War Dance and the Eagle Tail dance. They are revitalizing Cherokee dance by bringing back other dances from the past, by doing research, and by offering dance workshops for their community. In the past year, they have danced at the National Museum of the American Indian, Colonial Williamsburg, and at events in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia.