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 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.

Suzanne Moore, now retired from the University of Maine System in the United States, spent most of her working years focusing on social issues such as low income housing and distance education, and environmental protection in Maine. Early in her career, she was a technical writer and researcher for over 40 film and video projects, most often award-winning documentaries, and also created training and sales media projects. Recently she has been active in strengthening the learning resources in her hometown on the Maine Coast. She is a graduate of the University of Connecticut. Aware from an early age of the degradation of the environment, overpopulation and the effects of urban sprawl, she was drawn to lending a voice to the outcry slowly developing about the planet's plight. She joined the MEP team in 2005 at the Sedgwick, Maine meeting, having long observed that the problems are well outlined but solutions are lacking.

Grace Seybold graduated from McGill University in 2005 with a degree in East Asian Studies. She has been working as a writer for several years and has sold both fiction and non-fiction to various publications, including the Montreal Gazette, the Westmount Examiner, Polymancer Magazine, and the Tesseracts Twelve anthology. She also created the website of the Montreal Quaker Meeting, where she has attended for the past five years. Seybold is an avid bicycling and hiking enthusiast, and is currently working on an urban hiker's guidebook to the city of Montreal.



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