CHUCK COOK is director of The Nature Conservancy’s coastal and marine program in California and has worked extensively with the fisheries industry to improve fisheries management and marine conservation. Chuck is currently on loan to the University of California, Santa Barbara as project leader of the Sustainable Fisheries Group. It is clear who owns land. But who owns the water, or the fish, or the right to fish? Chuck and his colleagues work to resolve those questions by lobbying federal fishery managers and regulators to adjust permitting systems to allow for conservation easements.

WINONA LADUKE is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. Her books include Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (children's non-fiction), and The Winona LaDuke Reader. Her most recent book is Recovering the Sacred . She currently is the Program Director of Honor the Earth and the Founding Director of White Earth Land Recovery Project. Ms. LaDuke has received the Reebok Human Rights Award, the 1997 Ms Woman of the Year Award, the Global Green Award, was nominated by Time magazine as one of the country's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and numerous other honors.

JEFFREY A. MCNEELY is IUCN Chief Scientist and President of the Asia Secion of SCB. Jeff has been at IUCN since 1980, when he was appointed Executive Officer of the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas. He served as Director of the Program Division from 1983 to 1987, when he became Deputy Director General (Conservation). He was named Chief Biodiversity Officer in 1992 and he was appointed Chief Scientist in 1996, responsible for overseeing all of IUCN's scientific work. He has published 40 books and some 500 technical and popular articles on a wide range of conservation issues, seeking to link conservation of natural resources to the maintenance of cultural diversity and to economically-sustainable ways of life.

DIANE RUSSELL is Biodiversity and Social Science Specialist for USAID. She has twenty years experience in international research, development and conservation and has lived and worked in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Her interest in natural products dates to her post-doctoral research on farming and forest management systems within the cocoa agroforestry region of Cameroon in the early 1990s. She has served as a social scientist with the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) in Asia-Pacific and most recently as co-leader of the Trees & Markets theme at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. Diane Russell has a Masters in Environmental Management from Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University.

BILL MCKIBBEN is a writer and avid environmentalist. Currently a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, he has written several books, and contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and Mother Jones. McKibben’s books vary in nature; however, it was his first book, The End of Nature, that is considered the first public-oriented alarm about climate change. Since then, McKibben has written on several subjects, ranging from alternative energy, to outdoor adventures, to the risks associated with human genetic engineering. His most recent book, Deep Economy, states the need “to move beyond growth…begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy…” McKibben has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.