KAID BENFIELD is a senior attorney and director of NRDC's smart growth initiative and Director of the Smart Growth Program, Natural Resources Defence Council, Washington, D. C. He is the author of Solving Sprawl: Models of Smart Growth in Communities Across America. He specializes in smart growth issues because, unlike some causes, it is less a holy war and more an attempt to solve a very complicated puzzle with solutions that work for both people and the environment, making a lot of room for collaboration and creativity.

MARTIN HOFFERT is Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and was elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His research interests are global environmental change, geophysical fluid dynamics, oceanography, biogeochemical cycles and alternate energy technology. Professor Hoffert has been interviewed on PBS and has published in a wide number of journals including Climatic Change, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Icarus, and Space Power.

DAVID HURD is Director of the new Office for Recycling Outreach and Education and part of PlaNYC.

NATALIE JEREMIJENKO is an assistant professor of Visual Art and an affiliated faculty of Visual Culture. She directs the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, which develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence, and coordinates diverse projects to effect material change. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, and Faculty of Engineering at Yale. Her work was included in the 2006 and 1997 Whitney Biennial of American Art and the Cooper Hewit Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7, and has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Documenta '97 and Ars Electronic prix '96. She was a 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, has been named one of the 40 most influential designers by I. D. Magazine and one of the inaugural Top 100 Young Innovators by the MIT Technology Review. Her experimental design work explores the opportunity new technologies present for non violent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge, and information and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies -- mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of paired cloned trees in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards).

DERON LOVAAS is vehicles campaign director and deputy director of the smart growth and transportation program. He currently directs NRDC's oil security issue campaign and serves as chief lobbyist on the federal Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) reauthorization bill. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Deron coordinated Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl campaign and managed Zero Population Growth's sprawl educational outreach program. He also worked on transportation and air-quality planning at Maryland's Department of the Environment.

TED NORDHAUS is Chairperson of the BreakThrough Institute as well as being an author, researcher, and political strategist. He is co-author of Break Through and "The Death of Environmentalism. " Over the last twenty years, Ted has run major campaigns and initiatives for a large assortment of environmental and progressive political causes including the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, and Clean Water Action. He also served as the Campaign Director for Share the Water, a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, farmers, and urban water agencies advocating reform of federal water policies in California, Executive Director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project, and as a partner and political strategist with Next Generation and Evans/McDonough strategy and research firms serving political campaigns and environmental organizations. Ted holds a B. A. in history from the University of California.

MICAHEL SHELLENBERGER is the president of the BreakThrough Institute. He works on and writes about everything from energy to technology innovation to changing social values. As president of the Breakthrough Institute, he is a leading national advocate for the U. S. to make a 10-year, $500 billion public-private investment into cutting-edge clean energy technologies to achieve energy independence and restore America's economic competitiveness. He is co-author of Break Through and "The Death of Environmentalism. " Michael has written for L. A. Times, the American Prospect, Glamour Magazine, and other publications. Michael has worked as a strategist for efforts to win action on global warming, save the world's last redwoods, and improve working conditions for Nike factory workers in China. He was raised in Greeley, Colorado, received his B. A. from Earlham in Indiana, and received a Masters Degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California.

GEORGE THURSTON is a professor of Environmental Health Science and Deputy Director of NYU-Health Effects Institute (HEI) Particulate Matter Health Effects Research Center. He is also the Director of the NYU Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP), which works to inform the public regarding the potential environmental health implications of the aftermath of the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. He has been featured on CBS2 news based on his work regarding South Bronx children and their exposures to air pollution, and is author of "Air Pollution as an Underappreciated Cause of Asthma Symptoms," with D. M. Bates in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2003), "World Trade Center Cough," with L. C. Chen, in Lancet (2002), "Climate Change: Hidden health benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation," with L. Cifuentes, V. Borja-Aburto, N. Gouveia, and D. Davis in Science (2001), and "Summertime haze air pollution and children with asthma," with M. Lippmann, M. Scott and J. M. Fine. Am. J. in Respitory and Crititcal Care Medicine 1997).

TYLER VOLK is a professor in the Earth Systems Group of New York University's Biology Department. He's taught courses in visual science and on patterns in time. Inspired by Gregory Bateson, who suggested that we concentrate on shapes, patterns and relations when studying anything from anthropology to cybernetics, Volk has written a fascinating study of patterns of patterns, or metapatterns. In Metapatterns (Columbia Press, 1995), which is already appearing in bestseller lists in the US, he explores the constants--patterns--throughout inconstant nature and the sciences. Other publications include Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of the Earth, (Copernicus Books/Springer-Verlag, 1998), co-authorship of "Phasic temperature control and photoperiod control for soybean using a modified Cropgro model" in Life Support and Biosphere Science, 1999, and most recently, a forward to the book Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000). He has received two NASA Summer Faculty fellowships; one at Ames Research Center and one at Johnson Space Center, and is involved in collaborative research on crop growth and development with Utah State University, NASA Ames Research Center, and NASA Kennedy Space Flight Center. "There are two main types of lessons that we gain from knowledge about the biosphere. In the first, we apply patterns of local or global ecology (Gaia theory) to promote the material structuring and thus well-being of humanity. As a primary message, I will show how nature amplifies life by hundreds of times via recycling. I will compare terrestrial to marine systems and look into how nature deals differently with various elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and calcium. The second main type of lesson is more metaphysical. It concerns the transfer of patterns from ecology into mental values, attitudes, goals, ideals. "

ROBIN NAGLE is an anthropologist and environmental journalist and Director of the Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought. Dr. Nagle is author of Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation Theology in Brazil (Routledge), "Pelo Direito de Ser Igreja: the Struggle of the Morro da Conceicao," in The Progressive Church As a Catalyst for Social Change in Latin America, ed. John Burdick and William Hewitt, (Greenwood Press), and is possibly best known for being in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation.

HARVEY MOLOTCH is a U. S. sociologist and a sociology professor whose research topics have included racial segregation and "white flight," the Santa Barbara Oil Spill and environmental sociology, the mass media and frameworks of social construction, and urban development. Dr. Molotch has many awards, including a Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship issued by the American Sociological Association's Urban and Community Studies Section (2003), the ASA Award for the Outstanding Journal Article of the Year in Political Sociology (2001), and an Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Sociology, American Sociological Association (1990), and has been a fellow or visiting researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center in Como, Italy, and at the University of Lund in Sweden. Selected works include Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (Routledge, 2003), Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, co-authored with John Logan, (University of California Press, 1987), Managed Integration: Dilemmas of Doing Good in the City (University of California Press, 1972), and "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" in The American Journal of Sociology (1976).