Keynote Speakers

Eban Goodstein

Project Director of Focus the Nation and Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College

Photo of Eban Goodstein

Photo: Eban Goodstein

Focus the Nation is a major educational initiative that is coordinating teams of faculty, students and staff at over a thousand colleges, universities and high schools in the United States, to collaboratively engage in a nationwide, interdisciplinary discussion centered around the theme of "Stabilizing the Climate in the 21st Century". The project will culminate January 31, 2008, in the form of one-day, national symposia held simultaneously on campuses across the country.

Eban Goodstein, Project Director of Focus the Nation is Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. Goodstein is the author of a college textbook, Economics and the Environment (John Wiley and Sons: 2004) now in its fourth edition, as well as The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the Environment. (Island Press: 1999).

Goodstein's current research focuses on the economics of global climate change, a subject on which he has spoken widely. Articles by Goodstein have appeared in among other outlets, The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, and Environmental Management. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Time, Chemical and Engineering News, The Economist, USA Today, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Goodstein received his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He serves on the editorial board of Environment, Workplace and Employment, is on the Steering Committee of the Center for the Applied Study of Economics and the Environment, and is a Member Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform.

Michael M'Gonigle

EcoResearch Professor in Environmental Law and Policy in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria

Photo of Michael M'Gonigle

Photo: Michael M'Gonigle

A lawyer and political ecologist, his work with Greenpeace in the 1970s led to the international moratorium on commercial whaling. During this time he co-founded Greenpeace International. In the 1980s, he worked on wilderness conservation and forestry reform in British Columbia, including leading the successful struggle to protect the Stein River Valley from industrial logging.

As Chair of the Board of Greenpeace Canada, he initiated its forests campaign in 1990. A co-founder in the late 1990s of SmartGrowth BC and Forest Futures (Dogwood Initiative), he recently founded the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance at UVic.

He is author, most recently, of Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University (with Justine Starke) (New Society Publishers) (2006).