IAN BALDWIN moved to Vermont from New York City in 1982. In 1984 Ian and his wife Margo founded Chelsea Green Publishing Company. In 2005 he cofounded the bimonthly journal Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence. He was one of the founders, with Kirkpatrick Sale and others, of the E.F. Schumacher Society in 1980, now the New Economics Institute. Ian is an artist and writer. He lives in South Strafford, Vermont.

ERIK ANDRUS writes and farms with draft horses in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, with his wife Erica and two young boys. Since the writing of this piece, the farm’s work has shifted toward ecologically modeled wet rice cultivation.

PETER BARNES is an entrepreneur and writer who has founded and led several successful companies, including Working Assets/Credo. His ground-breaking book is Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons.

GAELAN BROWN has a background in journalism, Internet business development, consulting, and values-based marketing along with leadership experience in sustainability-focused nonprofit organizations. Gaelan is cofounder/Board Chair of www.CompostPower.org, which is focused on generating energy as a by-product of compost systems.

FRANK BRYAN is the retired John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. A Vermonter since conception, he has published extensively on Vermont politics and town- meeting democracy including his major work Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works (University of Chicago Press). He maintains an active public-speaking agenda and is currently a trustee of the Vermont Historical Society.

BEN FALK developed Whole Systems Design, LLC, as a land-based response to biological and cultural extinction and the increasing separation between people and elemental things. He is a designer, builder, ecologist, tree-tender, and backcountry traveler, has studied architecture and landscape architecture, and holds a master’s degree in land-use planning. Ben has taught at the University of Vermont, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, and the Yestermorrow Design-Build School, as well as classes on permaculture and microclimate design.

CARL ETNIER has worked with sustainability issues since the 1980s, with much of that time in sustainable water and wastewater treatment. In 2006, he turned his attention full time to educating people to prepare for peak oil. A founding member of Washington County’s Post-Carbon Sustainability Network and Transition Town Montpelier, Carl hosts radio shows and blogs about the transition to a low-energy future.

CHARLES EISENSTEIN is the author of The Ascent of Humanity and Sacred Economics. Links to his essays, films, and other work can be found at www.charleseisenstein.net.

JULIET BUCK is a bioregional decentralist, a writer/satirist, and delicate flower of Yankee womanhood with a profound lack of respect for authority. She served the web editor of Vermont Commons, where she labored to liberate the public from the flagrantly false notion that they live in a functional democracy that serves any purpose other than to siphon off the surplus value of their labors to the elites who write our laws and dictate our policies via congressional proxies to serve that end.

ROBERT COSTANZA is Distinguished University Professor of Sustainability at Portland State University. His transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address research, policy, and management issues at multiple time and space scales, from small watersheds to the global system. He is cofounder and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and was chief editor of the society’s journal, Ecological Economics, from its inception in 1989 until 2002. He is founding editor in chief of Solutions (www.thesolutionsjournal.org) a new hybrid academic/popular journal.

RICHARD FOLEY has served on the faculty at Keene State College in New Hampshire for more than three decades, working in the interdisciplinary fields of sustainability, media literacy, and science, technology, and policy. As a longtime resident of Brattleboro, Vermont, he has been active in numerous grassroots groups promoting local media, peace and justice, the 9/11 truth movement, climate protection, and renewable energy.

GARY FLOMENHOFT served s a research fellow for the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, managing the Green Tax and Common Assets Project. He helped devise the Vermont Common Assets Trust Fund bill. Previously, he worked for eight years on the foundation and ballot status of the Green Party in California and the United States. When he realized that the political system is entirely immune to reform from third parties, he turned his attention to alternative economic systems and studied, then worked in ecological economics. Gary came to the conclusion that the United States has become a militaristic, corporatist global empire, destined to collapse like all empires before. He joined the Vermont secession movement when he determined that Vermont could implement a commons-based economy, but never as part of the U.S. global empire.

BEN HEWITT was born and raised in northern Vermont, where he still lives with his wife and two sons. He operates a small scale diversified farm and writes just enough to pay for his farming habit. To read more of his work, go to www.benhewitt.net.

JAMES HOGUE is an actor and radio host who operates a small farm. He is currently working on monetary reform, including plans for a state bank and state/public currency.

ROWAN JACOBSEN is the author of numerous books, including Fruitless Fall, American Terroir, and Shadows on the Gulf. He lives in Calais, Vermont.

AMY KIRSCHNER is the founder of Vermont Resilience Lab, an open source innovation center, which created the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) Marketplace, a peer-to-peer mutual credit system. Amy grew up in Vermont and returned shortly after earning a B.S. in Business Management from Purdue University and then completed an M.S. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. She was a recipient of a 2010 Rising Star Award from Vermont Business magazine.

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER is the author of over fifteen books, including many novels. His recent work, including World Made by Hand and Too Much Magic, focuses on the destiny of industrial civilization. He lives 15 miles from the Vermont border in Washington County, New York.

ADRIAN KUZMINSKI is research scholar in philosophy at Hartwick College, the author of Fixing the System: A History of Populism, Ancient and Modern, and of the forthcoming work, The Ecology of Money: Debt, Growth and Sustainability. He is moderator of Sustainable Otsego, a social network with several hundred subscribers in central New York State.

DONALD W. LIVINGSTON is professor of philosophy, emeritus, Emory University. He is also a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

JOHN MCCLAUGHRY served in the Vermont House and Senate, was a Senior Policy Advisor in the early Reagan White House, and with Frank Bryan coauthored The Vermont Papers: Re-creating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989). For eighteen years he was president of the Ethan Allen Institute, and he has been Kirby Town Moderator since 1966.

ROBIN MCDERMOTT is the cofounder of the Mad River Valley Localvore Project and a local food enthusiast. She and her husband Ray grow much of their own food in their Waitsfield home garden and preserve the food for eating throughout the winter. When not canning, freezing, or making jam, Robin does programming and marketing for their Web-based training business, QualityTrainingPortal.com.

RON MILLER spent nearly thirty years as an educational scholar and activist, known internationally as a founder of the holistic education movement. He authored or edited nine books, established two journals, cofounded an alternative school, and was on the faculty of the progressive Education program at Goddard College. His work is archived at www.pathsoflearning.net. In 2011 he retired to run an independent bookstore in Woodstock, Vermont. He served on the Vermont Commons editorial board since 2007.

THOMAS NAYLOR passed away in December 2012. He was a retired economics professor at Duke University, and wrote about the problems of imperial America in books such as Downsizing the U.S.A. (1997), Affluenza (2005), and Secession (2008). He was the primary founder of the Second Vermont Republic (http://vermontrepublic.org/).

KIRKPATRICK SALE is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, and is the director of the Middlebury Institute for the study of separation, secession, and self-determination (MiddleburyInstitute.org).

BEN SCOTCH is a retired lawyer living in Montpelier. He served with Senator Patrick Leahy as a Senate Judiciary Committee aide from 1981 to 1985, after leading environmental enforcement duties in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office during the 1970s. In 1985 Ben began a fifteen-year term as chief staff attorney of the Vermont Supreme Court and then served for three years as executive director of the ACLU of Vermont. Since retiring, Scotch has worked as a citizen on issues of how we decide to go to war, money in politics, and law and policy concerning genetically modified foods.

HERVEY SCUDDER has directed the efforts of the NorthEast Center for Social Issues Studies (NECSIS) since 1996, promoting a sustainable energy future for Southern Vermont, most notably the successful 2001–4 lobbying campaign that resulted in the attempt by the state of Vermont to purchase the dams on the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers. More recently, he has focused on initiating biomass co-generation district heating systems projects in southeastern Vermont.

AMY SHOLLENBERGER has more than thirteen years of grassroots organizing, policy, and political issue campaign experience, including work as a press secretary for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, senior policy analyst for Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, and executive director of Rural Vermont. In 2010, she was the campaign manager for a gubernatorial primary candidate in Vermont. Her consulting firm, Action Circles, helps clients with political strategy, organizational capacity building, and meeting facilitation. Amy is a member of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, Women’s Business Owners Network, and other networks. Her organization’s website is at www.action-circles.com.

TAYLOR M. SILVESTRI is a part-time Vermonter, hailing originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who studied Creative Media at Champlain College, impulse-buys used books five at a time, wants to see the world from the belly of a whale, cries at books, movies, songs, blogs, weddings, and news headlines. She spends spare time experimenting in the kitchen.

WOODY TASCH is founder and chairman of Slow Money, a non-profit formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and sustainable agriculture. Woody is chairman emeritus of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit network of investors that has facilitated the flow of $150 million to 230 sustainability-minded, early stage companies and venture funds. He was previously treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, where he pioneered mission-related investing, and has served on numerous for-profit and nonprofit boards. In 2010, Utne Reader named Woody one of “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” He is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money.

ANNIE DUNN WATSON has been a counselor, educator, and conscientious planetary resident for many years. A reluctant activist, she nevertheless assisted in networking Vermont’s peak-oil activists, developing a public website and newsletter as well as opportunities for regional meetings during the activists’ pioneering years. Today, she focuses her attention on her beloved college students in hopes that their time together will bring about more good than mischief on Planet Earth.

JUDY WICKS is founder, in 1983, of Philadelphia’s landmark White Dog Cafe, a pioneer in the local food movement. She is a leader in the localist movement nationally and in Philadelphia as cofounder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), a network of some 30,000 independent, locally owned businesses in the United States and Canada, and founder of Fair Food Philly and the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia.

ROB WILLIAMS served as the publisher of Vermont Commons and now THE VERMONT INDEPENDENT. He is a Vermont-based professor, farmer, musician, historian, and journalist who teaches F2F and online courses at a wide variety of colleges, plays pholk phunk music with the Phineas Gage Project, and is now retired from raising grass-fed yaks in the Mad River Valley.

ENID WONNACOTT has been the executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont since 1987. NOFA-VT works to increase consumer access to local and organic foods, provides educational opportunities for farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders, and offers technical assistance to commercial farmers. Wonnacott grew up in Weybridge, Vermont, and holds a master’s degree in Natural Resource Planning from the University of Vermont. She lives in Huntington on a small homestead with her family.

MICHAEL WOOD-LEWIS and his wife Valerie founded Front Porch Forum in 2006 from their home in Burlington’s Five Sisters neighborhood. In the pre-Internet era, Michael worked for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C.