Plenary Speakers for the June 2006 NCC Eco-Justice Conference

June 1-4, 2006
Loyola University, New Orleans, Lousiana

Environmental author Bill McKibben is currently at work on a book about the future of human and natural communities titled Deep Economy. The End of Nature, his first book, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming. (It is now available in 22 foreign languages!) His other books include The Age of Missing Information; Enough, an account of new genetic technologies; and the recent Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Region. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, McKibben’s work appears in Harpers, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and a variety of other national publications. His essays are included in this year’s editions of best Christian writings. McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and a Methodist Sunday School teacher.

Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray is author of three books of literary nonfiction. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast. Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home is the story of a 750,000 acre wildland cooridor between south Georgia and north Florida. Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land is a meditation on our fragmented wilderness, the power of wild places, and the ways we can begin to repair the damage we’ve done to the land and to ourselves. Ray currently lives in Brattleboro, VT with her family although the Georgia farm is her home.

Dr. Beverly Wright is a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA. The DSCEJ is one of the few community/university partnerships that addresses environmental and health inequities in the Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor--the area commonly referred to as Cancer Alley. For more than a decade, she has been a leading scholar, advocate, and activist in the environmental justice arena. Wright directs numerous grassroots community-initiated health surveys, trains workers, and supervises community development around contaminated sites.

Having grown up in the shadows of the petrochemical plants of Louisiana, Jerome Ringo has seen first hand the impact industries have on the health and quality of life of citizens living nearby. As a twenty-year employee of those industries, both in Louisiana and Southeast Asia, Jerome possesses a unique perspective on the activities of those industries, both inside and outside the fence lines. An outspoken advocate on numerous conservation issues, Jerome has addressed local and state communities throughout the country, as well as lobbied over 100 members of Congress on issues ranging from protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to reforming the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to preserving the Everglades and the coast of Louisiana. Ringo serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Wildlife Federation.

Download the registration brochure.

For more information about the confrerence, contact Cassandra Carmichael at cassandra@toad.net or Rebecca Barnes-Davies at prc@sfts.edu