advisors

One Earth’s Advisory Council was established in 2010 to support the One Earth team in scoping out and implementing its program of work. Full biographies of our Advisors are below.

David Boyd: Environmental lawyer, professor, writer, and activist; research team for the Sustainable Prosperity Initiative; co-author, Sustainability within a Generation
Dianne Dillon-Ridgley: Environmentalist and human rights activist; international speaker on Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Population, Gender and Justice issues
Mark Holland: Principal, HB Lanarc planning and design firm, where he focuses on integrating sustainability principles into the mainstream development industry including for large-scale master-planned communities; extensive public sector experience (City of Vancouver’s first Manager of Sustainability).
Michael Kuhndt: Head of UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production
Erica Priggen: Executive Producer, FreeRange Studios; producer of The Story of Stuff and 350.org
William E. Rees, Chair: One Earth Founding Fellow; Professor, UBC; inventor of the ecological footprint
Bruce Schearer: Partner and Chairman, Apollo Philanthropy Partners; civic leader, former non-profit executive and expert in international development and philanthropy
Juliet Schor: Professor, Boston College; author of books including Born to Buy and The Overspent American
Peter Victor: Professor, York University; 40 years on environmental issues as an academic, public servant and consultant; economist and author of Managing without growth: smaller by design, not disaster

BIOS

David R. Boyd

David Boyd is an environmental lawyer, professor, writer, and activist. He is a Senior Associate with the University of Victoria’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance, an Adjunct Professor with Simon Fraser University’s graduate Resource and Environmental Management program and the former Executive Director of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund. Boyd has argued environmental cases at all levels of court in Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada. Boyd is the author of Unnatural Law: Rethinking Canadian Environmental Law and Policy (UBC Press, 2003), the editor of Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing (Douglas & McIntyre, 2001), the author of Canada vs. The OECD: An Environmental Comparison and many other reports on environmental law and policy. His essays appear regularly in the Globe and Mail and other newspapers. David is a research fellow with the Sustainable Prosperity Initiative.

Dianne Dillon-Ridgley

An environmentalist and human rights activist, Dianne Dillon-Ridgley is a noted international speaker on Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Population, Gender and Justice issues. Dianne Dillon-Ridgley is a director at Interface, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia, global manufacturer of commercial carpet, modular floor coverings, commercial fabrications and a leader in sustainable design. She is also a director at Green Mountain Energy, a leading retailer of renewably produced electricity in the United States, where she chairs the company’s environmental integrity committee. In addition Ms. Dillon-Ridgley represents the World Y.W.C.A (World Young Women’s Christian Association, Geneva, Switzerland) at UN headquarters in New York, is a trustee of the Wallace Global Fund and in 1999 was appointed to the Oxford University Commission on Sustainable Consumption. During the last ten years Ms. Dillon-Ridgley has served on numerous U.S. delegations at UN. global meetings and other international conferences. She was commissioned by the White House to serve as an advisor and member of the US. Delegation to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. After the Earth Summit she was appointed national co-chair of the Citizen’s Network for Sustainable Development in the U.S. In 1994 the US. Embassy in Cairo commissioned her to work with the Egyptian NGO Steering Committee for ICPD and in 1995 she spoke at the U N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In 1996 she was again on the US. Government Delegation at “Habitat II,” the City Summit in Istanbul and the Food Summit in Rome. UN Assistant Secretary Wally N’Dow commissioned her as his Gender Advisor for Best Practices during the preparatory process for Habitat and she was the U.S. member of the Best Practices International Jury at Habitat. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley was on the U.S. Delegation for the five-year review of the Earth Summit, United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS), June 1997, and the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. In 1998 she was private sector advisor to the US. Delegation of the World Meeting on Water, Paris. In 1994 President Clinton appointed her to the President’s Council on Sustainable Development where she also served as co-chair of the Council’s International Task Force with then Secretary of Commerce Daley and co-chaired the Population and Consumption Task Force with former Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth. From 1994-1997 she was president of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), the nation’s largest grassroots organization concerned with rapid population growth and the environment. She was Acting Executive Director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) during 1998 and 1999. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley did her undergraduate work at Howard University and is state-certified by the Iowa Mediation Service as a mediator specializing in agricultural mediation and public policy negotiation. In 1997 she was elected Board Vice-Chair of the National Summit on Africa and received the United Nations Association of America Garst Memorial Award for individual service and global citizenship. In 1998 she was elected to the steering committee of the Global Water Partnership, Stockholm. She is also a former director of the Iowa Humanities Board, a division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 1987 to 1998 she chaired the Targeted Small Business Board for the Iowa Department of Economic Development and served four terms as president of the Association of Iowa Human Rights Agencies. Currently a trustee of the International Board for Auburn University’s School of Human Sciences, she was adjunct lecturer at the University of Indiana School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Since 1991 she has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Aspen Law and Business’ Fair Housing and Fair Lending Publications, now a Wolters Kluwer Company. In 2000 she was elected to the boards of the River Network, Second Nature and the Natural Step-US. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley has appeared on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, the Today Show, PBS and numerous local news programs in the US. She has also been featured on NHK, Japan; the BBC programs, The Today Show and One Planet; NPR; APR’s The Environment Show and Marketplace; Nile TV; Greek Public Television; and in Brazil, Senegal, South Africa and Sweden among other countries.

Mark Holland

Mark Holland is Principal at HB Lanarc in Vancouver. Mark‘s consulting work focuses on integrating sustainability principles into the mainstream development industry, with an eye to developing competitive advantage for his clients and their projects. He frequently works closely with development teams to find cost-effective ways of developing in a more sustainable manner, including projects from small infill to large-scale master-planned communities, in both the rural and urban context. Mark has extensive public sector experience, including serving as the City of Vancouver’s first Manager of Sustainability. Mark was also the sustainable development planner and project co-ordinator for the Southeast False Creek sustainable urban development project, now the site of the Athlete’s Housing for the 2010 Olympics. His current work with local government focuses on city-wide sustainable development strategies for small and large cities across North America, including recently the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico and many cities in British Columbia. Mark was selected as PIBC’s Planner of the Year in 2010. He is sought after as a speaker and is widely known for his ability to “make sense of sustainability” in a pragmatic way that leads to action. In 2009, Mark was appointed as an advisor on the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Team alongside such leaders as Dr. David Suzuki, Former Premier Mike Harcourt, and Vancity CEO Tamara Vrooman.ch pro

Michael Kuhndt

Michael Kuhndt is the Head of the UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP). As head of the CSCP, he coordinates the Centre’s contribution towards the Marrakech process for implementing the 10-Year Framework of Programmes for Sustainable Consumption and Production. This involves consulting governments and international organisations on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) and CSR policies. He presently directs projects in the fields of SCP and poverty reduction, total risk performance assessment and management, Corporate Social Responsibility and reporting, technology assessment, triple bottom line innovation management, sustainable consumption, product stewardship and the design of strategies based on multi-stakeholder approaches at company, product chain and sector level. He has worked with or for a variety of organisations including UNEP, UNIDO, Worldbank, ILO, the European Commission, InWent, GTZ, the Global Reporting Initiative, the Global e-Sustainability Initiative and various other sector associations. Furthermore he work for different multinational companies, examples are: Barclays Bank, Canon, EMI, Hewlett Packard, Philip Morris, Matsushita and Motorola. Michael Kuhndt studied chemical engineering and environmental management and policy in Germany, and Sweden. After gaining professional experience in the development and application of environmental and social information for management decisions at a German Bank and in the automobile sector, he worked for the European Commission for two years on linking environmental information demand and supply in industry and science. He was a senior consultant within the “Sustainable Production and Consumption Department” at the Wuppertal Institute and a permanent consultant at United Nations Environment Programme within the “Sustainable Consumption and Production” unit. He is founding director of triple innova, one of the leading German CSR research centres.

Erica Priggen

Erica Priggen is the Executive Producer of Free Range Studios. As the head of Free Range’s video and entertainment department, Erica oversees the creative and strategic development of all of the company’s video campaigns. With a Master’s in Consciousness Studies, she brings a deep study of sustainability and systems thinking to her work, with a concentration on the importance of storytelling and mythology as tools for cultural transformation. She believes that film is one of the most effective ways to inspire people to action. Her years of experience in live-action and animation production (commercials, television and features), combined with her love of the creative process, allows her to work on meta level messaging with a groundedness in what it takes bring a piece of media to its most impactful manifestation. Erica is the producer of Free Range’s award-winning The Story of Stuff, as well as other hits such as 350.org, The Good Life, and the Alliance for Climate Education’s national high school assembly program. When she is not making Free Range films, you can find her outdoors and enjoying being an amateur beekeeper… completely awed by the wisdom and elegance of nature’s creations.

William E. Rees

Chair, Advisory Council

William (Bill) Rees is Founding Fellow and Director of the One Earth Initiative and Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is also Director of UBC’s Centre for Human Settlements. He is a leading thinker on sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and is best known in this field for his invention of ‘Ecological Footprint analysis’, a quantitative tool that estimates humanity’s ecological impact on the ecosphere in terms of appropriated ecosystem (land and water) area. This research reveals the fundamental incompatibility between continued material economic growth and ecological security, and has helped to reopen debate on human carrying capacity as a consideration in sustainable development. The book Our Ecological Footprint was published in 1996 and has been translated into eight languages. He has taught at UBC since 1969 and was awarded the Trudeau Foundation Fellows Prizes in May 2007 in recognition of outstanding achievement and innovative approaches that advance “knowledge of crucial societal issues across borders and disciplines.” He was elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2006. His teaching, research and public engagement emphasize the policy and planning implications of global environmental trends and the necessary ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development. Much of his work is in the realm of ecological economics and human ecology. He is a founding member and a recent past President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. In 1997, UBC awarded William Rees a Senior Killam Research Prize in acknowledgement of his research achievements. Bill Rees is currently a co-investigator in the ‘Global Integrity Project’, oriented toward determining the necessary ecological conditions for biodiversity preservation. Another of his current research project examines high-income urbanized countries’ consumption of imported commodities and the ecological and social impacts of their resultant “ecological footprints” on distant export regions. He has been invited to lecture on his work across Canada and around the world. He has extensive local and international experience on these issues and is widely published. In 2000, the Vancouver Sun newspaper recognized him as one of British Columbia’s top “public intellectuals.”

S. Bruce Schearer

S. Bruce Schearer, Partner and Chairman, Apollo Philanthropy Partners, is a civic leader, former non-profit executive and expert in international development and philanthropy, has led efforts to build partnerships between government, civil society and private sector groups to address poverty, development and environmental challenges in over 30 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As President of The Synergos Institute, he cofounded the Global Philanthropists Circle, establishing it to become what BusinessWeek described as “a new model of giving that links some of the world’s wealthiest families.” He has advised the United Nations Development Program, Millennium Promise, the Magis system of Jesuit educational organizations in Latin America, and other groups on strategy, programs, and institutional development. He has worked with Joseph Jaworski and Otto Scharmer on large-scale change processes and with Deepak Chopra and the Alliance for a New Humanity on linking inner personal change to outer change in the world. Mr. Schearer is the author of books, policy papers and articles, including most recently Some Thoughts on Creating High Value Multistakeholder Partnerships (2005), prepared for the World Economic Forum. He is an honors graduate of Lafayette College and earned his PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University, where he was also an International Fellow at the School of International and Public Affairs. He serves as a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Juliet Schor

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. Schor’s latest book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, September 2004). Born to Buy is both an account of marketing to children from inside the agencies and firms and an assessment of how these activities are affecting children. Schor is author of the national best-seller, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1992) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. The Overworked American appeared on the best seller lists of The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe as well as the annual best books list for The New York Times, Business Week and other publications. The book is widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family. The Overspent American was also made into a video of the same name, by the Media Education Foundation (September 2003). Schor is also the author of Do Americans Shop Too Much? published by Beacon Press in 2000, co-editor of Consumer Society: A Reader (The New Press 2000) and co-editor of Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century (Beacon Press 2002). She is currently working on issues of environmental sustainability and their relation to Americans’ lifestyles. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor went on to receive her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts. She also holds a chair in the Economics of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the Economic Journal, The Review of Economics and Statistics, World Development, Industrial Relations, The Journal of Economic Psychology and other journals. Schor has served as a consultant to the United Nations, at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, and to the United Nations Development Program. She was a fellow at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1995-1996 for a project entitled “New Analyses of Consumer Society.” In 1994, Schor was given the Maurer-Stump Award from the Reading-Berks Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and in 1998 she received the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language from the National Council of Teachers of English. Schor has lectured widely throughout the United States, Europe and Japan to a variety of civic, business, labor and academic groups. She appears frequently on national and international television and radio, and profiles on her have appeared in scores of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and People magazine.

Peter A. Victor

Peter Victor is a Professor with the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. He is an economist and has worked on environmental issues for 40 years as an academic, public servant and consultant. He teaches an undergraduate course in environmental management and graduate and undergraduate courses in ecological and environmental economics. From 1996 to 2001, Peter Victor was Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies. This followed several years as Assistant Deputy Minister of the Environmental Sciences and Standards Division in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Prior to that he was a principal of VHB Consulting and Victor and Burrell Research and Consulting where I undertook numerous influential policy-related economic studies in Canada and abroad. He continues to provide technical advice to public, private and non-governmental organizations on areas as air pollution and health, emissions trading, emerging issues, energy, and full cost accounting at the national and corporate levels. He has served on many boards and commissions. Currently he is a member of the Advisory Council of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science, Canada’s oldest science organization having served as its President from 2000 to 2004. He was the founding President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics and has been a member of many boards and committees including currently the Ontario Government’s Advisory Committee on Transboundary Science, the Advisory Panel of TruCost, the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Advisory Committee on the National Accounts for Statistics Canada. These days he considers himself an ecological economist, identifying with many others who have come to understand economies as subsystems of the biosphere. He became increasingly interested in the shortcomings of neo-classical economics and capitalism, especially in relation to the connection between the economy and the environment. His current research is an inquiry into managing without growth, utilizing LOWGROW, a systems model of the Canadian economy for exploring the interplay of growth, employment, poverty and the environment. He has published several papers on managing without growth with his former professor Gideon Rosenbluth. His book Managing without growth: smaller by design, not disaster’ was published in 2008 by Edward Elgar Publishing. He is also a member of a SSHRC funded team working on a 3 year project on The Ethical Foundations of Ecological Economics and the Tools for Its Assessment.