Peter G. Brown is a professor in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. Before coming to McGill, he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland's graduate School of Public Affairs. While at the University of Maryland, he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, the School of Public Policy itself, and established the School's Environmental Policy Programs. He is a graduate of Haverford College, holds a Master's Degree in the Philosophy of Religion from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in Philosophy. He is the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America (Beacon Press, 1994), and Ethics, Economics and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life, Second Edition (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). It is published in North America as The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth, Second Edition (Black Rose Books, 2008). (Click here to read a review of The Commonwealth of Life from the Journal of Sustainability.) Peter Brown is actively involved in conservation efforts in the James Bay and Southern regions of Quebec, and in Maryland. He operates tree farms in Maryland and Quebec and is a Certified Quebec Forest Producer, and in 1995 was Tree Farmer of the Year in Garrett County, Maryland. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

Geoff Garver is an environmental law and policy consultant in Montreal, Quebec. From 2000 to 2007, he served as Director of Submissions on Enforcement Matters at North America's Commission for Environmental Cooperation, directing the unit that handles assertions by North American citizens that one of the NAFTA countries -- Mexico, the United States or Canada -- is failing to effectively enforce its environmental law. Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division as a trial attorney and then as an Acting Assistant Chief handling cases concerning land and natural resource management, water rights and environmental impact assessment. His major cases included suits dealing with Everglades water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park and water rights in Idaho and Oregon. From 1993 to 1995, he was special assistant and Senior Policy Counsel to the Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining the U.S. Justice Department in 1989, he was a judicial clerk for the Hon. Conrad Cyr in the U.S. District Court in Maine. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1982 and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 1987. Geoff grew up in a Quaker family in rural Western New York.

Keith Helmuth has been primarily an entrepreneur, business manager, and community development activist. He is a founding Board Member of the Quaker Institute for the Future. Now living in Woodstock, New Brunswick, he spent the last ten years as Manager of Penn Book Center, in Philadelphia. During the prior three decades he and his wife, Ellen, operated North Hill Farm in western New Brunswick. During this time Keith and Ellen helped found the Woodstock Farm Market Cooperative and the Speerville Mill Cooperative. Keith served on the Carleton Pioneer Credit Union Board of Directors for twenty-five years. During the 1970's he worked with the Public Participation Programmes of the Saint John Valley Regional Planning Commission and the Man and Resources Commission, Atlantic Region. From 1967 to 1970 Keith was on the faculty of Friends World College where he taught social ecology and environmental studies, served as Director of Library Development, and was the founding Chairperson of the Independent Studies Program. He spent a year at the College's East African Center as Director of Economic Development and Environmental Studies. From 1961 to 1967 Keith managed academic bookstores in Iowa City, Iowa, Syracuse, New York, and New York City. He is a graduate of State University of Iowa (Intellectual History, Humanities, and East Asia Studies). He is the author of two Canadian Quaker Pamphlets: If John Woolman Were Among Us: Reflections on Flush Toilets and Motor Vehicles and From Arrowhead to Hand Axe: In Search of Ecological Guidance, as well as a volume of poems for children, Beauty is the Earth's Bright Call.

Robert Howell is a consultant and university teacher with competencies in strategic visioning, strategic planning, governance and policy setting, organizational and systems design and implementation, and business ethics. He has wide-ranging experience, having worked in advisory, teaching and CEO positions in the health, local authority, international education, and non-profit sectors. He has played a significant role in the introduction of social and environmental factors into New Zealand investment. He has assisted in the introduction of non-violent conflict resolution training into the Indonesian police. He has led and worked with Aotearoa New Zealand Friends to identify a strategic appreciation of climate change and the long term social and economic consequences.

Steve Szeghi is Professor of Economics at Wilmington College, in Wilmington, Ohio, where he has been on the faculty since 1987. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, with a dissertation "The Effects of Legal Barriers to Entry Upon Yardsticks of Efficiency, Equity, and Appropriate Technology in Developing Countries." He served as Department Head and as Area Coordinator respectively for the Department and the Area of Accounting, Business Administration, and Economics, from 1998 until 2005. Professor Szeghi has research interests which have long focused upon Social Justice, Environmental Justice, and Ecology, in relation to both the Economy and Economic Theory. In recent years he has cultivated a keen interest in the socio-political economies of indigenous peoples as an alternative to the prevailing or dominant system. While concentrating upon the cultural values and economic systems of the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest, Szeghi has grown to question many of the usually invoked assumptions of standard economic theory. He has also developed a new student study trip class called "Wilderness, Resources, and Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest." He has been forging ties with several American Indian Tribal governments and organizations to support the types of social change favored by indigenous communities, change which respects tradition, allowing for cultural survival and endurance, in the midst of a larger American Economic System all too determined to crush alternatives. He is an activist for social and economic change, from working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in his teens and twenties, to today in supporting and consulting for Labor Unions, such as the Teamsters in their organizing effort at DHL/ABX in Wilmington, Ohio, and Environmental Groups, such as SUWA in lobbying for a Redrock Wilderness Bill in Washington, DC.



Return to top