Special guests
Gene Baur
Gene grew up in Hollywood, California and worked in commercials for McDonald's and other fast food restaurants. Today, he campaigns to raise awareness about the negative consequences of industrialized factory farming and our cheap food system. He lives in rural New York state and is the co founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, America's leading farm animal protection organization, which runs the largest rescue and refuge network for farm animals in North America. After volunteering and working with various environmental and human rights causes, Gene turned his attention to animal agriculture. He has conducted hundreds of visits to farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses to document conditions, and his pictures and videos, exposing factory farming cruelty, have been aired nationally and internationally, educating millions. He has testified in court and before local, state and federal legislative bodies, and has initiated groundbreaking legal enforcement and legislative action to raise awareness and prevent factory farming abuses. His book, entitled Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food, was published in March, 2008 and has become a national best seller.
Tim DeChristopher
During the last days of the Bush Administration, Tim DeChristopher put his liberty on the line at a BLM auction, where hundreds of thousands of acres in Utah were being sold. DeChristopher walked past the protesters outside and talked his way into the event (an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called it a “…fire sale, the administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry”). He entered, intending to merely cause a disruption. Instead, he started bidding for a tract and won the rights to $1.7 million of pristine public land near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. He had no intention of paying for it. This act of civil disobedience (Ed Abbey might have called it “monkeywrenching”) resulted in the auction being declared null and void, and the Obama Administration has since removed the land from the market to preserve it. DeChristopher is being prosecuted for his actions and could face jail time, but as he said, “America is still very much the kind of place that when you stand up for what is right, you never stand alone.”
Chris Jordan
Photographer Chris Jordan vividly documents the combined effects of our culture of consumption in his art, providing a unique perspective and commentary on the role we all play in mass consumerism. He is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist and activist whose work explores the detritus of American mass culture. Chris's work is exhibited widely in the US and Europe, and has been featured in magazines, newspapers, weblogs, documentary films and television programs all over the globe. A sought-after speaker on the subject of mass culture, Chris also has appeared on several television programs and is currently the spokesperson for National Geographic's Earth Day 2008. (more at www.chrisjordan.com)
Roz Naylor
Rosamond Naylor is a scientist and the director of the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. She has been involved in a number of research projects throughout the world that concern aquaculture, high-input agricultural development and food security.
Tom Passavant
A New Yorker for twenty-three years, Tom traded his Metrocard for a lift ticket when he and his wife moved to Aspen, Colorado, five years ago. (He had initially fallen in love with the mountain town in 1978 while writing a book on North America’s top twenty-five ski resorts.) Fortunately, he was able to take much of his writing and editing work with him, and he continues to contribute to a wide range of publications, including Diversion (where he is editor at large) and Aspen Magazine. Tom spent ten years on the editorial staff of Playboy, in both Chicago and New York, and fifteen years as the editor-in-chief of Diversion, where he worked closely with the late Steve Birnbaum. Recently, he and his wife have been spending time in Southeast Asia, an area they are especially fond of, as well as Hawaii. And in terms of an overall dream trip: “I still haven’t gone to Africa for a safari. I’d put that at the top of my list.”
Ed Viesturs
Ed Viesturs is America's leading high altitude mountaineer, having climbed many of the world's most challenging summits, including ascending Mount Everest six times. He recently completed a 16-year quest to climb all 14 of the world's highest mountains (above 8,000 meters) without the use of supplemental oxygen. In doing so, he became the first American and the 5th person in the world to accomplish this. Viesturs was born in 1959 and grew up in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where the highest objects on the horizon were water towers. After some beginner's rock climbing at Devil's Lake, Wisconsin, Viesturs left the Midwest for the University of Washington in 1977 and inaugurated a long-running obsession with the mountains.
Jim Whittaker
Jim Whittaker is an American mountaineer, best known as a member of the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition led by Norman Dyhrenfurth. He was the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Despite running out of oxygen, he summited on May 1, 1963 clad head to toe, including long johns, in Eddie Bauer, with the Sherpa Nawang Gombu (a nephew of Tenzing Norgay). In 1965 Jim guided Robert Kennedy up the newly-named Mount Kennedy and in 1990 he led the Everest Peace Climb that brought together climbers from the United States, USSR and China. In addition to putting more than a dozen climbers on the summit, the expedition hauled off a large amount of trash left on the mountain by previous expeditions. In 1999 Whitaker released his autobiography, A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond. Now, Whittaker is chairman of the Board of Magellan Navigation, a company that produces handheld global positioning system (GPS) units and is an advisor for Eddie Bauer's new line of leading-edge expedition outerwear and gear, First Ascent.
