Biographical information about the 27 contributors to Fleeing Vesuvius.
Patrick Andrews qualified as a solicitor in 1988 and spent many years working in the UK and abroad for large corporations, specialising in cross-border transactions. In 2002 he left the corporate world, driven by a concern about its impact on society and the planet. He now teaches and writes about alternatives to conventional ownership and governance structures, and works with business leaders devising new ways of organising. He helped develop a radical financial and governance structure for Riversimple LLP. He lives in the New Forest in England with his wife and son, and a big vegetable patch.
Graham Barnes has been part of Feasta’s Liquidity Network team since November 2008 and became a Senior Policy Advisor in December 2009. As a neophyte economist (his doctorate is in Computer Science), he has been getting to grips with what he calls “the strange concept of money”. He splits his time between Kildare and Dorset, where he co-owns a converted Edwardian department store and runs a consulting business bridging online technology and the travel and tourism industry.
Corinna Byrne is a Fulbright scholar and is currently completing her PhD in soil carbon at the University of Limerick. She is a member of the Feasta Executive Committee and co-ordinator of the Feasta-led Carbon Cycles and Sinks Project which began work in late 2008. She lives near Ardrahan, Co. Galway.
Chris Cook has been involved in the regulation and development of markets and enterprises for 25 years, including six years as a director of a global energy exchange. He is currently working in the area where the Internet and markets converge, mainly in Scotland with Nordic Enterprise Trust (NET) and seed funding from Innovation Norway. His aim is to develop new partnership-based enterprise models and related financial products and services. He lives in Scotland.
Julian Darley is the founder of both Global Public Media and Post Carbon Institute, pioneer organisations which work to provide education about and demonstrate solutions for problems of energy depletion, climate change and ecosystem decline. He is also the author of High Noon For Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis. He holds an MA in journalism from the University of Texas and an MSc in social research and the environment from the University of Surrey. He is now an academic researcher, a consultant and dramatic writer. His current work focuses on the intersection of business, government and civil society in pursuit of decision-making and power distribution in a world of fast-changing energy and environmental parameters. He lives near London.
Bruce Darrell grew up in Canada where he was educated as an architect. Since moving to Ireland he has been actively involved in developing sustainable communities with Dublin Co- housing and more recently with Ireland’s first eco-village in Cloughjordan, Tipperary, where he is active in the areas of education, food and land use. He has a keen interest in developing urban and small-scale agriculture systems and in exploring the many possibilities and benefits of reintegrating human habitation with food production. He runs several courses on how to grow food and is working to establish a series of research and educational gardens. He is currently nearing the completion of a home for his family in Cloughjordan which he self-built with his neighbour.
Brian Davey trained as an economist but, aside for a brief spell working in eastern Germany showing how to do community development work, has spent most of his life working in the community and voluntary sector in Nottingham particularly in the health promotion, mental health and environmental fields. He helped develop Ecoworks, a community garden and environmental project for people with mental health problems. He is a member of the Feasta Energy and Climate Working Group and the Co-ordinator of Cap and Share UK. His life-long interest is why and how people and systems break down. He lives in Nottingham.
Richard Douthwaite is an economist, journalist and author specialising in energy, climate and sustainability issues. He is a co-founder of Feasta and serves on its executive committee. His books include The Growth Illusion (1992), Short Circuit(1996) and The Ecology of Money (1999). He lives near Westport, Co. Mayo.
Alex Evans is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, where he runs CIC’s work on climate change resource scarcity and global public goods and works with organisations including the UN, the World Bank and the Brookings Institution. He completed a joint CIC – Chatham House project on the international implications of rising food prices in 2009. From 2003 to 2006 he was Special Adviser to Hilary Benn, then the UK Secretary of State for International Development. He lives in London.
Gillian Fallon studied French and Psychology at university before going to work as a cook, eventually opening a restaurant with a friend. She then re-trained in publishing and has worked as a writer, journalist and editor for 15 years, most recently in academic publishing. She has a particular interest in food security and in the challenges involved in communicating the many complex messages derived from systems thinking to a non-specialist audience. She has been a member of Feasta’s Executive Committee since 2006 and currently divides her time between Dublin and Co. Kerry.
Nate Hagens recently completed his PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont, studying issues surrounding the end of the growth-based global society. On the supply side, he studied biophysical analyses on measuring our natural resources in natural resource terms (as opposed to dollars). On the demand side, he researched how our evolved neural algorithms created both opportunities and constraints in dealing with resource limits. Ultimately a new more sustainable economic system would better match our demand drivers with our natural resource balance sheet. He is a director of the Post Carbon Institute, the Institute for Integrative Economic Research (IIER) and the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, the parent of online energy analysis site www.theoildrum.com. In earlier years he worked on the dark side as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street and as an investment manager at the firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers.
Tim Helweg-Larsen has been Director of the Public Interest Research Centre since 2006. He trained as an engineer in renewable energy at Warwick University, before going on to project manage small-scale renewable projects in the Indian Himalayas. Tim has an extensive history of climate change research and advocacy. He has worked on climate policy with the Global Commons Institute, representing it at the UN climate change negotiations between 2002 and 2006. He has lectured at University of East London on climate, energy and economic issues, and led the Zero Carbon Britain report published by the Centre for Alternative Technology in 2007. In 2009-10 he chaired The Offshore Valuation Group, a consortium of government and industry bodies seeking to place a value on the UK’s full offshore renewable energy resource, resulting in a report, The Offshore Valuation. In 2011 he will be starting a new social enterprise to enable energy users to become investors in the renewable energy projects that supply their needs.
Oscar Kjellberg is an economist, agronomist and, after helping to develop the Swedish interest- free JAK Bank for 17 years, a banker. He is now engaged as a consultant in the development of the new debt-free and risk-sharing forms of savings and finance that are needed to enable entrepreneurs to assemble suitable mixes of equity and loan capital during the risky transition to sustainability. He lives on an old tugboat in Stockholm harbour during the summer months and in a flat ashore during the winter.
Tom Konrad is a financial analyst, freelance writer, and policy wonk specializing in renewable energy and energy efficiency. He manages green stock market portfolios, and promotes clean energy by testifying before legislators and regulators on energy policy. He writes articles about investing in clean energy for AltEnergyStocks.com, and about energy policy and economics on Clean Energy Wonk. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder, and has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Purdue University, where he wrote his thesis on Complex Dynamics, a branch of chaos theory. His study of chaos theory led to his conviction that knowing the limits of our ability to predict is much more important than predictions themselves, a lesson he applies to both climate science and the financial markets.
David Korowicz is a physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feasta’s executive committee and works as an independent consultant. He is on the council of Comhar, Ireland’s Sustainable Development Council. He circulated Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production in early 2010. His interests include systemic risk, risk management. and emergency planning. He owns an English-language bookshop in Kyrgyzstan but lives in Dublin.
Laurence Matthews is a mathematician who has worked as a university lecturer and in the transport industry where he carried out consultancy work on five continents. For several years he has lectured and campaigned on the psychology of climate change, and has given evidence to the Environment Select Committee of the House of Commons. He is currently Chair of Cap & Share UK, an NGO promoting Cap & Share in Britain. He lives on the English-Welsh border near Hay on Wye.
Lucy McAndrew is a doctoral research student at NUI Galway. Her area of interest is environmental ethics and particularly the notion of respect as a concept around which a broad ethic, which would include an environmental ethic, could be built. She worked as a Voluntary Service Overseas volunteer in Sudan, Indonesia and Kenya and as a research assistant to Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme. She lives with her husband and children in Erris, Co. Mayo.
Kenneth Mulder is Farm Manager and Research Associate at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont. He has a PhD in ecological economics from the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont and has published several articles on establishing metrics for energy harvesting technologies. His current work is focused on the energy efficiency of human- and oxen-powered agriculture systems.
Dmitry Orlov is the author of the award-winning book Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. Born in Russia, he moved to the US while a teenager, and has traveled back repeatedly to observe the Soviet collapse during the late eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer who has worked in many fields, including high-energy physics research, e-commerce and internet security. He has recently been experimenting with off-grid living and renewable energy by giving up his house and car. Instead, he has been living on a sailboat, sailing it up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and commuting by bicycle. He believes that, given appropriate technology, we can greatly reduce personal resource consumption while remaining perfectly civilised.
Emer O’Siochru is a qualified architect and valuation surveyor. She was a founder of Feasta and serves on its executive committee. She is director of EOS Future Design which designs and develops sustainable systems and settlements. She also manages the Feasta-led Smart Tax Network which is funded by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to develop tax policies in areas related to the environment. She lives in Dublin.
Davie Philip has over 12 years’ experience managing events and projects in the ‘sustainability’ sector in Ireland. He was a founding member of both Feasta and Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd., the company behind the eco-village project in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, where he now lives. In 2000 he set up the Sustainable Ireland Cooperative with Ben Whelan, which trades as Cultivate. With Cultivate he organises networking and learningevents including the annual Convergence sustainable living festival. He has produced a number of educational programmes including Tipping the Balance, a CD-ROM learning resource exploring the UN Millennium Development Goals; and Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland and sits on the board of SEAI, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.
James Pike is an architect and was a founder partner in Delany Mac Veigh and Pike, which was set up in 1964. This practice evolved into O’Mahony Pike in 1992. He has played a continuing role in the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland since the 1960s and was its president in 2006-7. He is currently Chairman of the Irish Architecture Foundation and a founding member of the Urban Forum. He contributes to many urban design projects in his practice and has promoted research projects on sustainability issues with the Dublin Instititute of Technology and University College Dublin. He has played a major role in several publications including Dublin City in Crisis, New Housing and New Housing in Context. He lives in Dublin.
Mark Rutledge has spent 20 years working with a number of global healthcare companies and is currently European Supply Chain Director with a major healthcare company. He has a B.Sc. from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and gained a M.Sc. in environmental science from University College Dublin in 2007. His final thesis is centred on aspects of the carbon cycle, central to any discussion on climate change. He has been Country Director of The Ecology Foundation and a consultant to the Dail parliamentary committee on Climate Change and Energy Security. He has served on the Feasta executive committee and with a number of other NGOs involved in environment and climate change. He currently works in Galway during the week and returns home to Dublin at weekends.
Anne B. Ryan is currently a lecturer at the Department of Adult and Community Education, at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her research and teaching interests include deep security, citizen-leadership, morality and identity. She has been researching, writing and conducting workshops about the philosophy of “enough” for many years. Her books include Enough is Plenty: Public and Private Policies for the 21st Century (2009), Feminist Ways of Knowing (2001) and Balancing Your Life (2002). She is a Feasta Trustee and lives in Celbridge, Co Kildare.
Eamon Ryan holds a Commerce degree from University College Dublin. Before entering politics, he set up and ran two businesses, Irish Cycling Safaris and Belfield Bike shop. He first became involved in politics in 1998 when he was co-opted to Dublin City Council. Before his election to the Dáil in 2002 he was an active member and chairman of the Dublin Cycling Campaign and served on the Advisory Committee of the Dublin Transport Office. Prior to his appointment as Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources when the coalition government was formed in 2007 he was the Green Party spokesperson for Transport and Enterprise, Trade and Employment and opposition convenor on the Joint Oireachtas Committee for Communication, Marine and Natural Resources. He is married to the writer Victoria White and they have four young children.
John Sharry trained as a scientist, social worker and psychotherapist. He is Director of the Parents Plus Charity and a weekly columnist for The Irish Times. He is the author of ten books in counseling and mental health including three best-selling positive psychology books and seven popular self-help books for parents and families. His writing has been translated into eight languages including Spanish Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. He is particular interested in how a psychological perspective is crucial in understanding how people will respond to the current peak oil/climate change crises. His website is http://www.solutiontalk.ie. He lives in Dublin.
Dan Sullivan has has focused on reconciling the views of left and right since he was ten and says he has arrived at a perspective remarkably similar to that of classical liberals and early progressives. He has been researching ramifications of land value tax since 1978 and has led successful efforts to get shifts to land value tax in Pittsburgh, where he lives, and in other Pennsylvania cities. He is currently the director of education of Saving Communities, a Pittsburgh-based NGO, and is an adviser to the Council of Georgist Organizations, an umbrella group for land value tax educators and advocates.
Chris Vernon holds masters degrees in Computational Physics and Earth System Science, has studied energy systems and environmental decision making and is currently working towards a Ph.D. in glaciology focusing on the Greenland ice sheet. He has a decade’s engineering experience in the field of cellular telecoms, specialising in radio network architecture and off- grid power systems in emerging markets. He is also a Trustee at the Centre for Sustainable Energy and a European editor of The Oil Drum, a popular weblog studying energy security and policy and regularly speaks on energy security. To get away from the computer he competes in triathlon events. He lives in Bristol.
Caroline Whyte grew up in Belfast and Dublin and studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Her involvement with Feasta began in 2002 while she was living in the western United States. She collaborated with Richard Douthwaite on an online update of his book Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies in an Unstable World, and she has been managing the Feasta website since 2003. She studied ecological economics at Mälardalen University in Sweden in 2005-6, writing a masters thesis on the relationship between central banking and sustainability. She lives in a disused quarry in central France.
Read the Preface by Eamon Ryan, Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Ireland
Read the Introduction by Richard Douthwaite
Table of Contents
About this Book
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