2009 Mountainfilm Festival: Special Guests

Rudolph Amenga-Etego	Dave James
Conrad Anker	Shelton Johnson
James Balog	Robert Knight
Dan Barber	Nicholas Kristof
Nevada Barr	Ace Kvale
Gene Baur	Quang-Tuan Luong
Big River Man	Tom Mason
Julia Judy Bonds	Bill McKibben
Paul Bosch	Peter Menzel & Faith D'Aluisio
Ken Burns	Roz Naylor
Alex Chadwick	Helena Norberg-Hodge
Jimmy Chin	Hilaree O'Neill
Ngawang Choephel	Timmy O'Neill
Ann Cooper	Kongar-Ol Ondar
Sienna Craig	Renan Ozturk
Tim DeChristopher	Cole Rise
Dennis Dimick	Pamela Ronald
Lynsey Dyer	Ming Tsai
Jerry Glover	Joshua Viertel
Jane Goren	Paul Watson
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke	Jim Whittaker
Jason Houston	Craig Williams
Manny Howard	Steve Winter
Aaron Huey	Jason Young

Rudolph Amenga-Etego 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner! In the struggle to secure safe, affordable drinking water for the world's poor, Rudolf Amenga-Etego, the visionary founder and campaign coordinator for the National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water, has gained international recognition for his winning campaign to suspend a major water privatization project backed by the World Bank in his native Ghana. To counter the threat of water privatization, Amenga-Etego is leading a campaign to make safe, affordable drinking water accessible to all Ghanaians by 2010. His grassroots and "grass tops" strategy has involved community "Right to Water" protest rallies as well as public forums that have compelled World Bank officials to confront and debate their critics. Amenga-Etego's activism has come at great peril to his personal safety. During the period of political instability in Ghana following a long series of bloody coups, Amenga-Etego was seized and jailed without trial many times for heading student protests. As the head of the Globalization Response Program for the Integrated Social Development Centre, Amenga-Etego's soft-spoken integrity, warmth and his unique ability to move between the worlds of the powerful and the poor have helped elevate water privatization as an important political and public health issue not only on a global scale, but on a deeply human one as well.
Conrad Anker Conrad Anker's specialty is, simply put, climbing the most technically challenging terrain in this world. This quest has taken him from the mountains of Alaska and Antarctica to the big walls of Patagonia and Baffin Island and the massive peaks of the Himalaya.
James Balog For twenty-five years, James Balog has consistently broken new ground in the art of photographing nature. His work springs from a passionate, lifelong involvement with nature as an artist, adventurer, scientist, and explorer. He is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James is a thinking man’s photographer: his books, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife, have been hailed as major conceptual breakthroughs in the visual arts. People, The New York Times, CNN, “CBS Sunday Morning,” ABC’s “Good Morning America” and National Public Radio have featured his work. His images have been exhibited in museums and galleries from Los Angeles to Greece, and regularly published in magazines like National Geographic, Time, Life, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He is a contributing editor of National Geographic Adventure. The U.S. Postal Service gave him the first-ever photographic commission to create a series of stamps. He holds a graduate degree in geomorphology from the University of Colorado, and the author of six books. Mr. Balog lives in the Rockies high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne and daughters Simone and Emily.(more at www.jamesbalog.com)
Dan Barber Dan Barber began farming and cooking for family and friends at Blue Hill Farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In May of 2000, Dan opened Blue Hill restaurant with family members David and Laureen Barber, and in 2002, Food and Wine Magazine named him one of the country's "Best New Chefs." Since then, he has addressed local food issues through op-eds in the New York Times and articles in Gourmet, Saveur and Food and Wine Magazine. Dan has been featured in the New Yorker, CBS Sunday Morning, House and Garden, and Martha Stewart Living; his writing has been incorporated into the annual "Best Food Writing" anthology for the past five years. In the spring of 2004, both Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture opened their doors in Pocantico Hills, New York. As the restaurant's executive chef/co-owner and a board member of the Stone Barns Center, Dan works to blur the line between the dining experience and the educational, bringing the principles of good farming directly to the table. His efforts to create a consciousness about the effects of everyday food choices have led him to numerous projects with Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, the Kellogg Foundation and New York City's Greenmarkets. Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns both received Best New Restaurant nominations from the James Beard Foundation; in the spring of 2006, Dan received the James Beard award for Best Chef: New York City.
Nevada Barr Nevada was born in the small western town of Yerington, Nevada and raised on a mountain airport in the Sierras. Pushed out of the nest, Nevada fell into the theatre, and for eighteen years she worked on stage, in commercials, industrial training films and did voice-overs for radio. During this time she became interested in the environmental movement and began working in the National Parks during the summers. Woven throughout these seemingly disparate careers was the written word. Nevada wrote and presented campfire stories, taught storytelling and was a travel writer and restaurant critic. Her first novel, Bitterweet was published in 1983. The Anna Pigeon series, featuring a female park ranger as the protagonist, started when she married her love of writing with her love of the wilderness, the summer she worked in west Texas. The rest is, shall we say, HISTORY!
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.
Big River man - martin strel Martin Strel, a legendary Guinness record marathon swimmer, has always been looking for the challenges of impossible and the Amazon was the most recent. In 2007, Martin Strel completed his epic Amazon river swim all the way from Atalaya (Peru) to the Atlantic Ocean at Belém (Brazil). He struggled on the river for 66 days, for more than 10 hours a day, and swam 3,274 miles. He became a wordwide hero. Martin was born in Slovenia, a small Central European country located south of Austria. He taught himself to swim when he was 6, in a nearby stream, and became a professional marathon swimmer in 1978.
Julia Judy Bonds 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner! A coalminer's daughter from West Virginia, Julia Bonds has led a passionate campaign against a highly destructive mining practice known as Mountaintop Removal. The technique destroys streams and forests and causes extensive flooding and blasting damage to homes. More than 1,000 miles of Appalachia headwater streams have been buried and 300,000 acres of the world's most diverse temperate hardwood forest wiped out by mountaintop debris. Working on a shoestring budget, and at considerable personal risk, Bonds has won important victories against powerful industry opposition.
Paul Bosch From earliest infancy I have been interested and involved in all the arts, especially the visual arts. Someone has said (Picasso? Matisse? Freud?) that painters are basically feces-smearers, and this was true of me in my crib, according to my parents. Further, my minor in college was Fine Arts, and I have continued all my life to pursue them. For most of my professional career I have served as University Chaplain or Campus Pastor. I am author of numerous published articles and essays on the subject of the arts as they pertain to religious faith, and three books on related themes. I have served as a popular preacher, teacher, workshop leader, and worship leader throughout the USA and Canada. I was married for 37 years to the late Kathryn (Stinar) Bosch of Lakefield, Minnesota, and I’m the father of Anna, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY; and Sarah, TV Producer at CNN, New York City. I’m the grandfather of five: Victor and Philip Allison of Lexington; and Bebe Bischoff and Kitty and Wiley Holbrooke of NYC.
Ken Burns Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 30 years. The late historian Stephen Ambrose said, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." Ken has produced and directed some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; Brooklyn Bridge; Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. His most recently released film, The War, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of nearly 40 men and women from four quintessentially American towns. Currently Ken is producing and directing a biography of the most compelling characters in the often-turbulent national parks story, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which will premiere at Mountainfilm this year. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including ten Emmy Awards, two Oscar nominations and the CINE Golden Eagle, the Clarion, People's Choice Award, the Peabody Award, the DuPont-Columbia Award, the D.W. Griffiths Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize.
Alex chadwick Alex Chadwick is an American journalist best known for his work on National Public Radio, and as a former co-host of the radio newsmagazine Day to Day. He was a part of the development of NPR's Morning Edition in the 1970s and was an on-air personality on All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Chadwick has also worked with ABC and CBS. In January, 2009, NPR laid off Chadwick. He was one of 64 employees terminated as part of NPR's response to a budget shortfall. Chadwick continues to do a video blog for Slate V called "Interviews, 50 cents". Chadwick received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative journalism, two Lowell Thomas Awards from the Overseas Press Club for foreign reporting, and was part of the CBS News team that produced the Emmy- and Peabody-Award-winning documentary, In the Killing Fields of America.
Jimmy Chin From unclimbed alpine towers in Pakistan's Karakoram mountains, to the deserts of west Africa, Jimmy's passion for travel, climbing, skiing, exploration and photography have taken him on break-through expeditions around the world. He is considered one of the most versatile and sought after expedition photographers working today. Some of Jimmy's recent assignments include photographing the cover story for Outside Magazine of Stephen Koch's attempt to snowboard the Direct North Face of Mount Everest; traversing the Chang Tang Plateau in northwestern Tibet with Rick Ridgeway, Conrad Anker and Galen Rowell, shooting video and still photography for National Geographic; and climbing the world's tallest freestanding sandstone towers while shooting for The North Face in Mali, Africa. In the Spring of 2004, Jimmy climbed Mount Everest with David Breashears and Ed Viesturs, while shooting the documentary video and production stills for a feature Universal Studios film. In the Fall of 2006, Jimmy made his second ascent of Mount Everest and skied from the summit, making the first American ski descent of the peak.
Ngawang Choephel Ngawang Choephel was born in 1966 in Tibet. He had fled the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1968, when his mother Sonam Dekyi had carried him as a two-year-old boy on her back through the Himalayas to India. Growing up in the Tibetan refugee settlement of Mundgod in southern India, Ngawang Choephel was enthralled by the music of the land he had left behind, and he found that traditional music was just about the only link he had to home. In 1992, after graduating from the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India, Choephel earned a Fulbright scholarship and spent a year studying ethnomusicology and filmmaking at Middlebury College in Vermont. He planned to use his new training to preserve Tibetan song and dance — traditions that were endangered because Tibetan teens were more interested in pop music, and because Chinese officials were conducting a systematic campaign to obliterate Tibetan culture. But when Choephel returned to Tibet, things began to go wrong. Barely a month after he arrived in August 1995 to begin making a documentary on traditional music and dance, he was detained by the Chinese government and held incommunicado. No official announcement of his status was made until December 1996. When he was finally brought to trial in a closed court, it found him guilty of "espionage and counter-revolutionary activities", and handed down a sentence of 18 years, one of the longest ever given to a Tibetan political prisoner. He was released after six years on medical parole in February 2002. He now lives in New York City pursuing his filmmaking career.
Ann Cooper Chef Ann Cooper is the renegade lunch lady. Her life work is to transform cafeterias into culinary classrooms for students — one school lunch at a time. Her mission is to change the way our children are eating, tackling outdated district spending policies, commodity-based food service organizations, political platforms with no mention of school food or child health — and ultimately the USDA — to ensure that kids everywhere have wholesome, nutritious, delicious food at school.
Sienna Craig TimSienna Craig was born in Santa Barbara, California, and educated at Brown University (BA 1995). She is the author of the children’s book Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story and A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet, as well as numerous academic articles. For the past decade, Craig has been conducting research in Nepal and Tibetan areas of China, on topics ranging from Tibetan medicine and women’s health, to community development, labor migration and social change. She is the co-founder of DROKPA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to catalyzing grassroots development and social entrepreneurship in high Asia. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (2006) and is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She lives in Vermont with her husband Ken and their daughter Aida. (more at www.siennacraig.com)
Tim DeChristopher Tim, an economics major at the University of Utah, threw an auction of oil and gas drilling rights into chaos in December by out-bidding all others on 22,500 acres of land surrounding Arches and Canyonlands national parks. He went into the auction - rushed in to the last days of the Bush Administration - fully intending to bid, but not to pay. Because of Tim's actions, the auction was invalidated and the land will not be opened to drilling but he now faces prison for his actions.
Dennis Dimick Dennis Dimick serves as executive editor at National Geographic Magazine in Washington DC. He previously served as the magazine’s environment editor. His slide show “Where Energy and Climate Meet” focuses on the nexus between climate change, our energy choices, and a sustainable economy. Using photography and graphics from National Geographic stories, the show is based on three Sept. 2004 articles called “Signs from Earth” that document observed effects of climate change worldwide, and from other recent articles on fossil fuels and alternative energy. The show keys on the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – and recent warming of earth’s climate. It presents a range of low-carbon energy choices we have available if we hope to stem the rising tides and other impacts of a warming planet. The Sept. 2004 “Signs from Earth” articles were cited in 2005 by the Overseas Press Club for best environmental coverage, and received second place from the Society of Environmental Journalists for explanatory journalism. An August 2005 article on alternative energy called ‘Future Power” was rated by the magazine’s readers as the most popular of the year. An Oregon native, Dimick holds degrees in agriculture and agricultural journalism from Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the National Geographic staff in 1980, Dimick was a photographer and reporter at newspapers in Oregon and Washington, and served as an editor at The Courier-Journal of Louisville, KY. He and his family live in Arlington, VA.
Lynsey Dyer Lynsey Dyer is an athlete with an art habit or an artist with a skiing habit, whichever it is, the two compliment each other nicely. As a professional skier residing in Jackson Hole, WY, Lynsey has made a name for herself staring in such films as Teton Gravity Research and Warren Miller for five years running. Her face and graceful skiing style have also seen plenty of action amongst the glassy pages of Men's Journal, Women's Health, Outside, Powder, and Freeskier to name a few. Her skiing background gives her illustrations a unique perspective that only a pure mountain lifestyle could offer. Determined to create a strong, unifying and inspiring place for the feminine in sport, her work depicts strong yet feminine characters in play with nature. With a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Photography, Lynsey has balanced her ski career shooting weddings, events and portraiture. As an illustrator, Her designs can be seen on everything from skis to t-shirts, posters to web. (more at Lynseydyer.com)
Jerry Glover Named by Nature magazine as one of five crop researchers who could change the world with his work at the Land Institute, Jerry Glover studies perennials, such as wheat, that could have a huge effect on the way we grow food.
Jane Goren Jane Goren often uses recycled objects and observations as a metaphor for survival in an edgy world. She finds inspiration in things others discard and often works with these resources, raising issues of materialism and relative value. Goren was born and educated in New York City and was part of the art and theatre scene there until she moved to Los Angeles . After LA’s last earthquake, she began collecting discarded windows, which she painted on the reverse side of the glass, in an attempt to heal and restore order to the disoriented city. Travel has always played an important part in Goren’s life and work, and has been essential to her artistic development, informing her work with a multicultural dynamic charged with personal meaning. Jane Goren has exhibited extensively in the United States as well as internationally. Her work has been included in such public collections as Mercedes-Benz, the national Public Library, the LAUSD Child Abuse Prevention office and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, as well as the private collection of President Fidel Castro. She lives and works in LA and spends as much time as possible in her studio in Telluride, Colorado.
ambassador Richard Holbrooke Richard C. Holbrooke is Vice Chairman of Perseus, a leading private equity firm. He currently serves as the United States Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has also served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, where he was also a member of President Clinton’s cabinet (1999-2001). As Assistant Secretary of State for Europe (1994-1996), he was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. He later served as President Clinton’s Special Envoy to Bosnia and Kosovo and Special Envoy to Cyprus on a pro-bono basis while a private citizen. From 1993-1994, he was the US. Ambassador to Germany. During the Carter Administration (1977-1981), he served as the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and was in charge of U.S. relations with China at the time Sino-American relations were normalized in December, 1978. He has received over twenty honorary degrees and numerous awards, including several Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
Jason Houston Jason Houston is a documentary photographer based in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. In addition to his perpetually evolving work on food culture, recent projects include a personal series on the social landscape of suburban American family life and a long-term project documenting the community-based grassroots campaigns of Rare Conservation in developing countries throughout the tropics. His images have appeared in print, online, and broadcast media around the world and have recently been exhibited at Yale University, Spike Gallery NYC, and the DeCordova Museum as well as many other venues. Houston is currently represented by Ferrin Gallery and also works as picture editor for Orion magazine. His website is www.jasonhouston.com.
Manny Howard Manny Howard wrote a piece for New York Magazine about living off his own land - in Brooklyn, NY, a social experiment that went awry.
Aaron Huey Aaron Huey is a freelance photojournalist known for his global features in the National Geographic magazines, the Smithsonian, the New Yorker, Time, the New York Times, Harpers, GEO, and many more in the foreign press. He has covered the drug war in Afghanistan, Benazir Bhutto's assasination, antiquities smuggling in Africa, Sufism on 4 continents, Native American gangs, hidden temples in Eastern Burma, lost tribes of the Caucasus, the Los Angeles fires, and many many more subjects on evey continent. In addition to these he is also known for his 3,500 mile solo walk across America in 2002, as well as his National Geographic sponsored Trans-Siberian Hitchhiking journey in 2007. Aaron's latest projects include a documentary feature film on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, an upcoming story on Human Slavery with Ben Skinner (author of A Crime So Monstrous), and a large format photo project at Salvation Mountain in Southern California (which he will be showing this year at Mountainfilm). Aaron was recently awarded a National Geographic Expedition Council Grant, was short listed for the Alexia Prize, and named to PDN’s top 30 emerging photographers in the world for 2007. This is Aaron's 3rd year presenting work at Mountainfilm. (more at www.aaronhuey.com)
Dave James Kay and David James raised their family of five children in the rural atmosphere of the Animas River Valley, 10 miles north of Durango, enriched with the love of the land, animals, plants, and family. Fifteen years ago, the adult children began migrating back to the ranch seeking the joy of rearing their families here and utilizing and improving this land. Today, four different agriculturally based enterprises are flourishing at James Ranch. The family has a quality of life goal that dictates the ranch remain in agriculture as a lifestyle preference for the families and open space for the community.
Shelton Johnson Shelton Johnson, a native of Detroit, Michigan, has worked as a U.S. park ranger since 1987. His work assignments have included Yosemite National Park, Great Basin National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and park areas within and around Washington, DC. He served with the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa, and attended Graduate School at the University of Michigan, majoring in creative writing. Shelton has won several writing awards, including a Hopwood Award in Poetry from the University of Michigan in 1981. Recent accomplishments include being selected as a member of an official National Park Service delegation to mainland China during the summer of 2000, and personally representing the Director of the National park Service while riding in an equestrian unit in the 2001 Tournament of Roses Parade. Mr. Johnson’s living history program, which focuses on the story of Yosemite and Sequoia’s buffalo soldiers, was recently selected by Sunset Magazine as one of the best interpretive programs in the United States.
Nicholas Kristof Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times. Early in his career he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia, writing articles to cover his expenses. After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. In 2000, he covered the presidential campaign and in particular Governor Bush. In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world." Mr. Kristof has taken a special interest in Web journalism and was the first blogger on The New York Times Web site. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area eight times. Virtually single-handedly, he has put the humanitarian crisis in Darfur on the world map. In the film Reporter, screening at Mountainfilm this year, Mr. Kristof leads the audience to some of the most atrocity-ravaged places on the globe and shows why honest, hard-hitting journalism is essential to freedom and democracy.
Quang-Tuan Luong Quang-Tuan Luong celebrates the splendor and variety of the natural and human heritage of planet earth through his photography. He has been privileged to travel through an immense geographic range, from the top of the coldest mountain on earth to under tropical seas. Originally trained as a scientist (X84, PhD U. Paris), the revelation of the high Alps led him to become a mountain climber and wilderness guide. Attracted by the proximity of Yosemite, he found his way to the University of California, Berkeley, where he produced award-winning contributions to the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing. There, he fell in love with the National Parks and decided to photograph in depth all 58 of them with a 5x7 large format camera, a monumental nature photography project that had not been completed by anybody before. He is now living in San Jose with his family and working as a full-time photographer. His photographs have been the subject of two books, and have appeared in several National Geographic publications, Time, Life, Outside, Scientific American, GEO, and many others in dozens of countries around the world. A very large collection of them can be seen on www.terragalleria.com, one of the most visited of all individual photographers websites.
Tom Mason Tom Mason is a Director of Photography and Documentary Producer based in New York City. He has worked on a wide range of video and still photography projects including "The Good Mother," for Arté France, the HBO feature documentary “Hard As Nails,” and "The Caring World," a large scale, site-specific documentary video installation for the 2008 Beijing Olympic village. He is a past winner of the first prize photojournalism grant from the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, and is currently an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Bill McKibben Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led some of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. His first book, The End of Nature, is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise. In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
Peter Menzel & Faith D'Aluisio Peter Menzel is a freelance photojournalist known for his coverage of international feature stories on science and the environment. His award-winning photographs have been published in GEO, Stern, Le Figaro, Der Spiegal, Paris Match, Focus, Muy Interesante, El Pais, National Geographic, Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine, and Time. Faith D’Aluisio is a former award-winning television news producer. She is the editor and lead writer for the book-publishing imprint Material World Books. In 1994 Peter Menzel created the bestselling book Material World, A Global Family Portrait, (Sierra Club Books). This epic work of photojournalism focused on the material possessions and daily lives of average families around the world. This was followed by Menzel and D’Aluisio’s first collaboration, Women in the Material World. In 1998 the team published the critically acclaimed Man Eating Bugs: the Art and Science of Eating Insects, a worldwide look at the human consumption of insects. Their latest book is another around-the-world exploration of average daily life in 24 countries—this time focusing on food. Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, details each family’s weekly food purchases and average daily life. The centerpiece of each chapter is a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week’s worth of groceries accompanied by interviews and detailed grocery lists. The book received the coveted James Beard Best Book Award in 2006 and was awarded Book of the Year from the Harry Chapin World Hunger Media Foundation. Menzel and D’Aluisio are now working on another world-wide nutrition book to be completed in 2009.
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.
Helena Norberg-Hodge Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, a leading analyst of the impact of the global economy on cultures and agriculture worldwide, and a pioneer of the localization movement. She is an Alternative Nobel Prize winner and was last at Mountainfilm in 2005.
hilaree o'neill Hilaree grew up skiing at Steven’s Pass in Washington state. She didn’t begin skiing competitively, however, until moving to Europe in her early twenties. She began with a few European extreme contests and derbies scattered throughout the Alps. After college graduation, Hilaree followed some friends to Chamonix, France, where she intended to spend the winter—a winter that turned out to be five years long. During this time, O’Neill slowly transformed from a lift-served skier to a big-mountain, backcountry ski mountaineer. She found she had what it took for extreme skiing: athletic abilities perfectly suited for the rigors of climbing as well as skiing and a spirit of adventure that would take her to faraway places and down many first descents.
timmy o'neill Timmy O'Neill is America's most outrageous climber. He has set "gob-smacking" speed climbing records from Yosemite to Patagonia, and has been at the cutting-edge of the sport for over 20 years. He is a world-class slackliner, renowned building solo climber, class 5+ kayaker and dangerously fast mountain biker.
Kongar-Ol Ondar Ondar was born in 1962 near the Hemchik River in western Tuva. Ondar's epic saga would converge around his singular vocal gift to make him Tuva's musical ambassador to the world. As a child, he was taught the fundamentals of throat-singing by his uncle. "Throat-singing is a tradition of Tuva that is very old," Ondar recently remarked. "it is inspired by the beautiful landscape of Tuva, which is full of sounds -- the windswept open range with grazing livestock, the mountain forests full of birds and animals and the countless streams tumbling out of the mountains onto the open range to form mighty rivers." By the early '90s Ondar's reputation had begun to take on an international scope. After a hugely successful tour of the Netherlands, the Tuva Ensemble recorded their first album, Tuva: Voices From The Land Of The Eagle. Ondar found himself in demand for a diverse range of globe-spanning projects. In 1993 alone, he performed and recorded with The Kronos Quartet, for their album Night Prayers; Ry Cooder, as well as Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead's Micky Hart, The Chieftains and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Ondar was also a special guest at a command performance in New York City, sharing the stage with a troupe of Tibetan Monks and Japanese avant garde pioneer Kitaro. In 1994, Ondar joined forces with San Francisco artist Paul "Earthquake" Pena to record a groundbreaking blend of throat-singing and blues, aptly titled Genghis Blues. The Academy Award nominated film by the same name, celebrating its 10th anniversary, will play at Mountainfilm this year.
Renan ozturk Renan discovered his passion for climbing while attending Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As a member of the small community of climbers there, he honed his skills, deepened his connection to the sport of climbing and dreamed of the remote and beautiful places it could take him. Renan graduated with a degree in biology but not before traveling to Nepal to study the language and culture of a country to which he is still intimately connected. During the last three years Renan has spent multiple seasons climbing in Indian Creek, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Squamish, and the Bugaboos. The stunning scenery of these locations serves as inspiration for Renan’s other passion, his artwork, which is creating as much of a buzz as his rock skills. Footage of Renan’s onsight solo of the 300-foot North Six Shooter tower in the Utah desert can be seen in the current climbing film Return2Sender: Parallelojams.
Cole Rise Cole has spent the better half of his life focused on photography, design, and multiple entrepreneurial ventures. With an early found interest in the web, he started his first company at 16, a web design firm that in turn funded his equally early love for photography. He studied cinematography in the Honors Program at Emerson College, before going on to start two more internet companies in pursuit of advancing how we share our information with the world, and with each other. He currently provides visual and creative insight as a founding member of Particle, an interactive product shop primarily funded by Justin Timberlake. To escape the throes of the desk and keyboard, he takes pleasure behind the lens; stalking cows and laying in the grass to capture the landscape. His photographic work has been featured in a whole heck-load of international creative magazines, books, billboards, websites, posters, and even a CD cover for a band you can Ô¨Ånd in most music stores. A New Yorker at heart, Cole currently lives in San Francisco.
Pamela Ronald Pamela Ronald is Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, where she studies the role that genes play in a plant's response to its environment. Her work has been published in Science, Nature and other scientific periodicals and has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, CNN and on National Public Radio. Ronald was a Fulbright Fellow from 1984-1985 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2000. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a 2008 Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 2008 she and her colleagues were recipients of the USDA 2008 National Research Initiative Discovery Award for their work on submergence tolerant rice. In 2009, they were nominated for the 2009 World Technology Award for Environment. Ronald is co-author with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, of "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food". "Tomorrow's Table" was selected as one of the best books of 2008 by Seed Magazine and the Library Journal. She writes an award-winning blog on food, farming and genetics.
Ming Tsai Ming was raised in Dayton , Ohio , where he spent hours cooking alongside his mother and father at their family-owned restaurant, Mandarin Kitchen. After graduating from Yale, Ming worked in kitchens around the globe. In 1998, Ming opened Blue Ginger in Wellesley, MA and immediately impressed diners from Boston and beyond with the restaurant's innovative East-West cuisine. In its first year, Blue Ginger received 3 stars from the Boston Globe, was named "Best New Restaurant" by Boston Magazine, was nominated by the James Beard Foundation as "Best New Restaurant 1998," and Esquire Magazine honored Ming as "Chef of the Year 1998." Ming is a national spokesperson for the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), working to further education and research on food allergies. Ming is proud to have developed the Food Allergy Reference Book, first used at Blue Ginger, a pioneering system that creates safeguards to help food-allergic people dine safely. Ming is currently the host and executive producer of the public television cooking show, SIMPLY MING, currently in its sixth season. In addition to television, Ming is the author of three cookbooks: Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai, Simply Ming, and Ming's Master Recipes. (more at www.ming.com)
Joshua Viertel Josh Viertel is working to make a good, clean, and fair food system. Josh was named Slow Food USA’s first President at age 30. Previously he had worked as a shepherd, a teacher, a vegetable farmer, an activist, a fisherman, and a baker. Before coming to Slow Food, he co-founded and co-directed the Yale Sustainable Food Project which brought local and sustainable food into Yale’s dining halls, created a farm on campus, and built programs in and out of the classroom on sustainability, food and agriculture. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly and numerous other publications. Josh lives in Brooklyn, New York in an ex-chair factory, with his partner, Juliana Sabinson, who is an artist, and their cat Louis, who is a pain. Slow Food USA is working to create a world in which all people can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who produce it, and good for the planet. In the U.S. Slow Food has more than 50,000 members and supporters nationwide. These members are organized into over 200 local chapters that do work in their local communities to create a good, clean, fair food system. Globally Slow Food has over 85,000 members in over 130 countries.
Paul Watson For 30 years, Captain Paul Watson has been at the helm of the world’s most active marine nonprofit organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Paul’s career as a master mariner began in 1968 as a seaman with the merchant marines and with the Canadian Coast Guard. He has authored six books: Shepherds of the Sea, Sea Shepherd: My Fight for Whales and Seals, Cry Wolf, Earthforce!, Ocean Warrior and Seal War. In 1972, he co-founded the Greenpeace Foundation in Vancouver, B.C. An old friend of Mountainfilm, Paul returns to the festival this year with his latest film At the Edge of the World, the harrowing account of the Sea Shepherd's voyage to the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary where Watson and his crew took on outlaw Japanese whalers.
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.
Craig Williams 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner! A cabinetmaker and decorated Vietnam War veteran, Craig Williams fought the Pentagon's plans to incinerate a chemical weapons stockpile near his home. His successful fight extended to other sites around the country and led to federal legislation requiring safe disposal solutions as well as transparency and accountability by the military.
Jason Young Jason Young was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1969. At 16, he went to study painting at the Cleveland Institute of Fine Arts followed by the School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles, at the University of Southern California. In addition to this, to complete his "classical" fine art education Young went to France in 1990 to study at the Sorbonne while apprenticing to the world famous Russian artist Yuri Kuper at his ateliers in Normandy and Paris. There, Young learned to paint in the highly realistic figurative style of "trompe-l'oeuil" for which Mr. Kuper was so famous. He rapidly evolved as an artist, not only developing his own style, but was quickly recognized by his peers as being one of only a handful of artists to pioneer the new medium of resin painting. Over the years, Young's style and use of materials have become even more intricate and daring. Three years ago Young extended art to filmmaking. Collaborating with director Pascal Franchot, "The Curling Stone" was well received in the film festival circuit and laid the foundation for WHITE, a one-of-a-kind film that incorporates live-performance, painting, sculpture and installation.