Presenters

Jill Stein is a mother, physician, and pioneering environmental-health advocate. She was the Green Party’s 2012 candidate for president of the United States. She has been on the front lines of social, economic and environmental justice, fighting for health care and education as human rights, to stop dangerous fossil fuel and nuclear power, and to create 20 million healthy, community-based green jobs instead. 

During the 2012 campaign she was arrested three times: for defending homeowners from eviction by predatory banks, for entering the grounds of a presidential debate that unfairly excluded her, and for bringing food to protesters blocking the deadly tar sands pipeline in Texas.

She serves as President of the Green Shadow Cabinet, an “alternative government” that watchdogs the corporate political establishment and raises the bar for real solutions that are available to us right now - for peace, justice, democracy and the green future we deserve. 

Jill now helps organize the Global Climate Convergence for People, Planet and Peace over Profit, an education and direct action campaign beginning Spring 2014 with a wave of action, “Earth Day to May Day”, extending across the US and beyond. The Convergence provides collaboration across fronts of struggle and national borders to harness the transformative power we already possess as thousands of justice movements, rising up against the global assault on our economy, ecology, peace and democracy. The Convergence lifts up local justice struggles while calling for a unified solution as big as the crisis barreling down on us – an emergency green economic transformation, including full employment, 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, health care and education as human rights, demilitarization, and an end to deportations and mass incarceration.

Jill was trained as a clinical doctor and served for decades as an instructor in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School. She began to advocate for the environment as a human health issue in 1998, when shocking revelations of pervasive human breast milk contamination and toxic pollution of the fetal environment first emerged. She provided medical and scientific support to community groups and non-profits fighting toxic exposures, environmental injustice and racism, including campaigns to shut down polluting trash incinerators and create recycling programs, to ban toxic pesticides, to clean up coal plants and put people to work in weatherization programs. She also helped update fish advisories in Massachusetts to better protect women and children from dangerous mercury contamination.

Jill co-authored two widely-praised scientific reports, In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, published in 2000, which has been translated into four languages, and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging, published in 2009.  They have been used broadly to help defend community health, and to clarify links between human health, climate security, and a green economy.  

Jill’s efforts to protect public health were recognized in several awards including: Clean Water Action's "Not in Anyone's Backyard" Award, the Children's Health Hero" Award, and the Toxic Action Center's Citizen Award.  

Jill has twice been elected to town meeting in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, Illinois. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1973, and from Harvard Medical School in 1979.   

After decades practicing internal medicine, she now practices "political medicine", focusing on the "mother of all illnesses" - the sick political system that needs emergency healing so we can start fixing all the other things that are literally killing us. This will enable us to build the healthy, just, sustainable future we deserve – and that is within our reach.

 

David Swanson

David Swanson is working to end all war at http://WorldBeyondWar.org  His books include: War No More: The Case for Abolition (2013), War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012).  He is the host of  Talk Nation Radio. He has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator.  Swanson helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011.  Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org  Swanson also works on the communications committee of Veterans For Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member. Swanson is Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet.

 

Steve Breyman

Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator

Steve Breyman is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he is a former director of the Department’s Graduate Program. Breyman was 2011-12 William C. Foster Visiting Scholar Fellow at the US State Department, where he worked on issues regarding NATO and nuclear weapons. He spent 2008 as New York State's senior social scientist on climate change in his capacity as Project Coordinator for Carbon Neutral Government and Institutional Operations in the Office of Climate Change at the Department of Environmental Conservation. In 2007, Breyman served as Executive Director of Citizens' Environmental Coalition, New York State's leading environmental health and justice group. He is former Director of Rensselaer’s Ecological Economics, Values & Policy Program. Breyman served for many years as faculty advisor to the Student Pugwash chapter at RPI, EcoLogic, and to the campus/community radio station, WRPI.

Breyman’s latest book is Why Movements Matter: US Arms Control Policy and the West German Peace Movement (SUNY Press). He writes on issues of war and peace, political economy, social justice, and sustainability. He is active in struggles for peace, environmental integrity, and justice in the US and abroad. Breyman is co-founder of the Rensselaer County Greens, and the Hudson-Mohawk Independent Media Center, and hosted a weekly progressive public affairs radio show—“On the Barricades”—on WRPI FM for many years. He was Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Citizens Environmental Coalition, served as Secretary of the Governing Board of Common Cause/New York, and as Treasurer of Brunswick Smart Growth, and is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of Environmental Advocates of New York.

 

Kristin Christman

Kristin Y. Christman is a full time mother who has homeschooled her two sons all their lives.  A native of Defreestville, NY, she is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1990, BA Russian, summa cum laude) and Brown University (1991, MA Slavic Languages).  While at Brown, the Persian Gulf War broke out and, frustrated with her inability to help stop the bombs from falling on Baghdad, she decided not to pursue further studies there.  Instead, she began reading independently on topics such as ethnic conflict, prejudice, religion, philosophy, foreign policy, and war.  In 1995, she received her Master of Public Administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany and was awarded with membership in Pi Alpha Alpha, the national honor society in the field of public affairs and public administration.  Several courses were directly relevant to her later writing, including courses in negotiation, decision-making, organizational behavior, cultural analysis, budgeting, and economics.  For many years along the way, she worked at various jobs including several secretarial jobs, the NYS Education Department, and Spanish teaching.  

In September of 2001, Kristin was provoked by 9/11 and inspired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill to create a US Department of Peace, and, during her sons’ naptime, she began developing a model for organizing the analysis of violence and the creation of solutions for peace.  In January of 2002, she independently submitted a Strategic Plan, Validation and Suggested Organization for a US Department of Peace to Kucinich.  Later that year, noting the lack of breadth and depth of dialogue about the proposed invasion of Iraq, she wrote and mailed a rationale against an invasion of Iraq and an invitation for dialogue to more than 100 friends and acquaintances.  Receiving little response, she initiated a dialogue by e-mail with a close friend over their differing views on foreign policy in order to learn more about each other’s viewpoints and to role model – not a debate, but a cooperative, “quest” dialogue, with the goals of promoting both truth and friendship.  

In 2003, she suggested to the Albany Times Union the idea of printing a “quest column” of cooperative dialogue over differing opinions on foreign policy.  The paper was interested, but wanted more research behind the column.  For the next eight years, while her sons slept at night, Kristin researched, wrote, and edited what became The Taxonomy of Peace:  A Comprehensive Classification of the Roots and Escalators of Violence and 650 Solutions for Peace.  Her project was placed online in 2011 where it is now available for free at http://sites.google.com/site/paradigmforpeace .  The website includes the 2,500 page Taxonomy document, as well as an Overview and Guide.  Since that time, she has continued to add to the website smaller documents, including Summary Charts, Excerpts, and Articles.  Most recently, she has had three op-eds published this year in the Times Union pertaining to school, education about past wars, and foreign policy.