the wise people

In 1977, Dr. Helen Caldicott founded the organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, which brought together over 20,000 doctors dedicated  to informing others about the risks associated with nuclear energy. Four years later, she was featured in a short documentary called If You Love This Planet, which later won an Academy Award. In 2011, Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke about the true consequences of Japan’s nuclear disaster as a response to her outrage of the mainstream media’s downplaying of the event.

 

Ernest Callenbach is an American writer best known for his ecotopian novels which spurred a cult environmental movement in the seventies. In 1975, Callenbach authored Ecotopia, a utopian novel about a country formed from states in the Pacific North West of the United States. The book had an important impact on the emerging “green” counterculture movement, and presented many predictions about the future. He has since continued to dedicate his non-fiction books to the subject of sustainability.

 

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist whose major focus rests on issues of war and politics in America, as well as the Middle East. He is an outspoken critic of capitalism and the American right (which he associates with the Christian fundamentalist movement). His latest book demonstrates how the liberal class and its institutions, have willingly become enslaved to corporations and their respective agendas.

 

Dacher Keltner is an upbeat voice in the world of science and psychology. His book, Born to Be Good, uses scientific studies to back up the claim of this title. With dominant cultural ideas about man being inherently greedy; having evolved into homo economicus, and being wired to consume, Keltner uses his scientific findings about compassion and awe (among others) to prove that our positive qualities are what ensure our survival, and that humans are inherently compassionate beings. Keltner is a professor at University of California, Berkeley and director of The Greater Good Science Center.

 

John Perkins is a writer, best-selling author and activist, who spent a decade working as an “economic hitman”. As a chief economist for an engineering/consulting corporation throughout the seventies, he was responsible for pressuring third world countries into serving a US agenda; relenquishing control over their precious resources, at a cost to both their economy and national welfare. Ever since, Perkins has been outspoken about the corruption and greed behind our economic system, as well as on the topics of sustainability, philanthropy, and spiritual wisdom.

 

Clayton-Thomas Muller is an indigenous activist from the Cree Nation in Manitoba, Canada. After years of grassroots organizing within various indigenous communities, Muller has become one of the central figures in the Indigenous Environmental Network. His campaigning has mainly focused on re-framing the Alberta tar sands as more than an environmental issue; but also an active, disastrous threat to the livelihood of indigenous communities in Alberta and British Columbia.

 

Micah White is a senior editor at Adbusters, the international culture jammer magazine credited with sparking the Occupy Wall Street movement. In a recent article for the UK Guardian, he received widespread attention for coining the critique of “clicktivism,” a kind of online activism that he argues erodes the revolutionary possibility of bottom-up social movements. White also criticizes consumerism and its counterpart, the massive advertising industry, which breeds what he refers to as “junk thought”, a metaphor for the pollution of our mental environments by the quantity of commercial information bombarding us each day.