Ed Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada's most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of 15 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Dawn Danby

An industrial designer by training, Dawn's a boundary-spanner who has acted as a cross-disciplinary designer and interpreter, art director, project manager, producer and artist. She apprenticed in green building and policy with the Fisk-Vittori team at CMPBS, and in furniture design with Macek Furniture. She now collaborates with international artist Noel Harding on Windsor, Ontario's Green Corridor initiative, where she helped teach an interdisciplinary course at the University of Windsor, and develop a retrofit demonstration eco-house. She also designed a $3.5M tree-covered, wind-powered pedestrian bridge.

Dawn has been a WorldChanging contributor since just after it began, connected by luck, geography and circumstance during the early Viridian heyday, and joined the board in 2006. She has spoken about designing for sustainability at TEDGlobal 2005: Ideas big enough to change the world (Oxford UK), Subtle Technologies (Toronto), and Unilever (Sao Paulo). A Canadian liaison for the o2 Global Sustainable Design Network (Toronto/Ontario), she also researches and maintains the sustainable/design/portal as a resource site for product designers.

With a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (2000), Dawn is currently a 2007 MBA candidate in Sustainable Business at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. She's recently consulted through BGI on closed-loop manufacturing for a leading outdoor footwear manufacturer. Other hats: secret identity as a medical illustrator for numerous books and journals, specializing in women's health; former and future art-maker, singer.

Dawn lives in Toronto. Aylanto, her little design consultancy, is named after the ailanthus altissima, best of the urban ruderal species. Invasive, heatseeking, alley-dwelling and concrete-devouring, they delight in inhabiting and remediating a broken landscape.

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Paul Fleming

Paul is a senior Strategic Advisor for Seattle Public Utilities, working on regional, state and federal water policy and on Seattle’s governmental responses to climate change and endangered species. He holds a BA in economics from Duke and an MBA from the University of Washington. He has over 15 years of experience managing environmental strategies, and has also served on the boards of several NGOs, including that of the King County Conservation Voters.

Pati Hillis

Pati combines a background in investment banking and technology (her husband Danny invented parallel supercomputing) with much insight into working towards social change in ways both public and private. She is known for her wide network. Pati splits her time between Los Angeles and Sausalito.

Alex Steffen

We find ourselves facing two futures, one unthinkable and the other currently unimaginable. My beat is looking for ways to create a future which is sustainable, dynamic, prosperous and fair -- a future which is both bright and green. WorldChanging's based on the premise that such a future is not a distant possibility, but a growing reality. We seek to connect worldchanging people with the tools, models and ideas for building it.

Exploring ways of building a better future has been my life's work. That work has taken me around the world, working as an environmental journalist on four continents (where I wrote about everything from Japan's fast breeder reactor program to the UN "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro). That work has also led me to provide strategic consultation to over 50 environmental groups (on issues like the fate of endangered species, the future of "smart growth" and "reframing" the environmental movement) and many foresight projects (anticipating, for instance, paths for a Pacific Northwest transition to sustainability, what green neighborhoods of the future might look like, and how to prevent the next use of nuclear weapons). I also served as president of the board of Allied Arts (the venerable Seattle urban design advocacy group), a co-founder of the Livable Communities Coalition and the Fuse Foundation, as well as having served on the boards or steering committees of something like twenty other NGOs and campaigns. I have been a newspaper columnist (for Seattle's the Stranger), a radio producer and guest host (for Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW) and an on-air television news analyst. I also started the short-lived but influential magazine, Steelhead, in the mid-nineties. Along the way I did graduate work at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies.

I've written or commented for the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, Fast Company, Red Herring, Blue: the Magazine of Adventure Travel, NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, Marketplace and elsewhere. My essays have been widely reprinted, translated into German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, and anthologized in the 2050 Project's book Choosing our Future and Das Science Fiction Jahr 2004. Lastly, I guest-edited the final issue of of Whole Earth Review.

I do a lot of speaking on these topics as well. You can hear the talk I gave at Pop!Tech here, and my keynote conversation with Bruce Sterling at this year's South by Southwest here. Besides the thousand-odd pieces I've done for WorldChanging, some of the my more frequently-quoted pieces include: an editorial on smart growth and sprawl, an op-ed on The Tech Bloom and a review of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Andrew Zolli

Andrew Zolli is a foresight and global trends consultant who analyzes critical trends at the intersection of culture, technology, and global society. His firm, Z + Partners, helps global companies and institutions see, understand and respond to complex change.

He is also the Curator of the annual PopTech conference, an elite annual gathering of thought leaders which explores the social impact of technology and the shape of things to come.

Andrew was recently named one of the Fellows of the National Geographic Society, where he is leading development of a global initiative to envision new scenarios for life in 2040-2050, and has served as Futurist-in-Residence at both Popular Science and American Demographics magazines, as well as Public Radio's Marketplace.

Andrew is a network member of the Global Business Network, and serves as a Visiting Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation . In early 2005 he was named to Fast Company's Fast 50, the magazine's annual compilation of emerging business leaders. In the same year, he was named one of Red Herring's "Top 20 Under 35". Andrew's work, writings and ideas have appeared in a wide array of media outlets, including PBS, National Public Radio, The New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, ID, Fast Company, The History Channel and many others.

In addition to his work with larger multinational organizations, Andrew advises a number of cutting-edge not-for-profit, public policy and venture-backed startups. He currently serves on the boards of Worldchanging.com, a leading online resource tracking the future of sustainability, and Blurb, a revolutionary publishing company.

In the 1990's, Andrew served as Chief Marketing Officer of one of the world's leading strategic branding consultancies, Siegel & Gale, where he helped develop new designs, businesses, products and services for companies such as The Weather Channel, Netscape, Kodak, American Express, Forrester Research and IBM, among many others. Andrew helped found the company's new media practice, and helped envision and develop next-generation approaches to product development, user experience, and communications. He also created and led the company's research and development lab, which explored digital user experience and interface design. Under his direction, the lab developed significant virtual reality and graphics applications for the Web. Prior to this, in the early 1990's, Andrew participated as an academic researcher in core technology and standards research and development that shaped the World Wide Web.