Holly Dressel, a best-selling author and researcher and professor at McGill's School of the Environment, is one of Canada's most recognized names in teaching, environmental studies, health care, economic concern s and aboriginal issues. Dressel is best known for her work with celebrated environmentalist David Suzuki on film and radio programs, as well as the three books they have written together: From Naked Ape to Super-species, Good News for a Change and More Good News.  She is also the writer, producer, broadcaster or researcher for too many radio and television series and documentaries to enumerate here, mostly done for CBC and the NFB.  In addition to her extensive involvement with environmental subjects, Dressel wrote Who Killed the Queen? The Story of a Community Hospital and How to Fix Health Care, which particularly addresses the global economic components of social systems like health care. Dressel has worked for many years with native and traditional communities around the world, from the Quebec Cree and Mohawk to the people of Colombia's Choco and the Kerala region of India.

Joshua Farleyis an ecological economist and Associate Professor in Community Development & Applied Economics and Public Administration at the University of Vermont. Josh holds degrees in biology, international affairs and economics. He has previously served as program director at the School for Field Studies, Centre for Rainforest Studies, as Executive Director of the University of Maryland International Institute for Ecological Economics, and as adjunct faculty and licensed examiner at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.  He recently returned from a Fulbright fellowship in Brazil, where he served as visiting professor at the Federal Universities of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and Bahia (UFBA).  His broad research interests focus on the design of an economy capable of balancing what is biophysically possible with what is socially, psychologically and ethically desirable.

John Fullertonis the Founder and President of Capital Institute, a collaborative space working to transform finance to serve a more just, resilient, and sustainable economic system. Through the work of Capital Institute, his syndicated "Future of Finance" blog, regular public speaking engagements, and university lectures, John has become a recognized thought leader in the New Economy space generally, and the financial system transformation challenge in particular.  Previously John was the seed funder and CEO of Alerian Capital Management, and before that a Managing Director of JPMorgan where he worked for over 18 years. He launched the Capital Institute in 2010. He is a Co-Founder and Director of Grasslands, LLC, a holistic ranch management company in partnership with the Savory Institute, and a Director of New Day Farms, Inc., New Economics Institute, and Savory Institute.org. He is the creator of the weekly Blog, "The Future of Finance" on the Capital Institute website.

Alain Gras est actuellement professeur émérite à l'Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.  Il a fondé le Centre d'études des techniques des connaissances et des pratiques (CETCOPRA) et le parcours « techniques, environnement, sociétés » de l'option sociologie du Mastère de philosophie et société. Socio-anthropologue des techniques, il a vécu ou participé à des recherches approfondies dans divers pays, en particulier en Suède, au Ghana, au Brésil, au Maroc, en Espagne. Il a beaucoup travaillé sur les problèmes posés par l'introduction des technologies de pointes dans l'aéronautique puis il s'est intéressé à la question de l'énergie. Cette question est prise d'abord comme un problème historique : la société thermo-industrielle, c'est-à-dire fondée sur l'usage du feu au détriment des autres éléments, s'est imposée non pas en continuité d'une évolution technique mais en rupture avec celle-ci.

John Grim is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University, where he has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies. He teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous religions and World religions and ecology. He has undertaken field work with the Crow/Apsaalooke people of Montana and Salish people of Washington state. His published works include: The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a co-edited volume entitled Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994). With Mary Evelyn Tucker, he directed a 10 conference series and book project at Harvard on "World Religions and Ecology," He edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The InterBeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001) and co-edited the Daedalus volume titled Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? (2001). He is co-founder and co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with Mary Evelyn Tucker.

Andrea Levy has a PhD in History from Concordia University and completed post-doctoral studies in Sociology at the Université de Montréal. She currently works as an independent scholar, journalist and editor. Her research areas include peace and ecology as social movements, the nature of work and precarious labour, and the intellectual history of the New Left, among other interests in connection with which she has contributed to various journals and written chapters for a number of edited volumes. She is also a regular contributor to and longstanding member of the editorial committee of Canadian Dimension magazine and a member of the Le Collectif de recherche inter et transdisciplinaire sur les impasses de la croissance (CRITIC).  

Joan Martinez-Alier is Professor of Economic History and Institutions at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona since 1975. He was Director of the Doctoral Programme in Environmental Sciences at ICTA-UAB between 1997 and 2009, where he helped to create a strong international group on ecological economics and political ecology. During his career, he has been Research Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and has held visiting positions at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Sao Paulo), Freie Universität Berlin, Stanford University, the University of California (Davis), FLACSO (Ecuador) and Yale University. He was a founding member and president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He is a member of the editorial board of Ecological Economics, Environmental Values, Journal of Agrarian Change and Journal of Peasant Studies. He is the author of numerous renowned books and articles that have contributed to illuminating the relationship between economic systems, resources (materials and energy) and social issues. A fundamental contributor to the development of ecological economics and political ecology, he has also engaged with social movements at local and international levels. His latest edited volume is Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (Earthscan-Routledge, London, 2012).

Serge Mongeau est écrivain, éditeur et conférencier. Il est l'auteur de 25 livres dont La simplicité volontaire, plus que jamais... Parce que la paix n'est pas une utopie, La Belle vie, Moi, ma santé  et Non, je n'accepte pas; il a aussi dirigé le collectif responsable du livre Objecteurs de croissance. Pour sortir de l'impasse : la décroissance, tous parus aux Editions Ecosociété. Il est l'un des fondateurs des Éditions Écosociété, auxquelles il continue à collaborer.  Il a étudié la médecine (Université de Montréal) et a pratiqué en tant qu'omnipraticien pendant deux ans; a aussi étudié en organisation communautaire (Université de Montréal) et en sciences politiques (à Santiago du Chili).Il est membre du comité de coordination du Mouvement québécois pour une décroissance conviviale, du comité exécutif du Réseau Transition Québec et du comité de coordination du Collectif Décroissance conviviale de Québec solidaire.  Tout au long des 50 dernières années, Serge Mongeau s'est impliqué dans un grand nombre de luttes pour une plus grande justice sociale et pour la sauvegarde de la planète.

Elizabeth Peredo Beltrán is Director of the Solon Foundation, a recognized institution in Bolivia for its work on human rights, integration and culture. Is the author of some books, various reports, articles and videos about social, economic and cultural rights and as water and gender activist took part in international campaigns linked to the World Social Forum. Between 1999 and 2003 was the National Coordinator of the Solidarity Committee on Domestic Workers Rights in Bolivia promoting the approval of an specific law to protect their rights. Since 2006 coordinates the "Blue October" Campaign in Bolivia, a big social yearly mobilization for the right to Water as a common good and human right. She is a Board Member of Food and Water Watch in the USA. belongs the Women's Net Transforming the Economy in Latin America and is part of the LA Committee for an International Tribunal on Climate Justice.

William Rees is an ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on the biophysical prerequisites for sustainability and on behavioral and cognitive barriers to progress. He is the originator and co-developer (with his former PhD student, Dr Mathis Wackernagel) of 'ecological footprint analysis'. Prof Rees has lectured widely across North America and in 25 other countries. He is a member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group; a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute; a founding member and past President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; and founding Director of the One Earth Initiative. The Vancouver Sun has named Prof Rees one of British Columbia's top public intellectuals. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada In 2006, awarded a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in 2007 and recently received an Honorary Doctorate from Laval University.

François Schneider is degrowth researcher and activist that contributed to the start of the degrowth movement in France.  Earlier he worked on the development of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and recycling methodology at the INSA engineering school in Lyon and at the CML in Holland. He finished his PhD in 1996. Later, he worked on material flow and rebound effect in institutes in Austria and Portugal.  Since 2001, he is active in the development of the degrowth concept and debate in France and Europe. In 2004-2005 he did a one year tour to debate degrowth in France, with the help of a donkey. He founded the research group Research and Degrowth in 2006 (www.degrowth.org). He organised many events focussing on participative processes. Among them he initiated and organised the first scientific conference on degrowth for Sustainability and Equity in Paris in 2008 as well as the second in Barcelona in 2010 (barcelona.degrowth.org). He now based in Can Decreix, a project of degrowth hub in Cerbere, France and works part time at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, Spain.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her most recent book is True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (previously published as Plenitude).She also wrote the national best-seller The Overworked American, The Overspent American and Born to Buy.Schor is a co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, a former Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Herman Daly Prize, and a member of the MacArthur Connected Learning Research Network, for which she is studying connected consumption.

David Suzuki, is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. He is Companion to the Order of Canada and a recipient of UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for science, the United Nations Environment Program medal, the 2009 Right Livelihood Award, and Global 500. Dr. Suzuki is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and holds 27 honorary degrees from universities around the world. He is familiar to television audiences as host of the multi-award winning long-running CBC science and natural history television series The Nature of Things, and to radio audiences as the original host of CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, as well as the acclaimed series It's a Matter of Survival and From Naked Ape to Superspecies. In 1990 he co-founded The David Suzuki Foundation to work with "government, business and individuals to conserve our environment by providing science-based education, advocacy and policy work for social change that today's situation demands". His written work includes more than 54 books, 19 of them for children. Dr. Suzuki lives with his wife, Dr. Tara Cullis, and family in Vancouver, B.C.

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies. She teaches in the joint MA program in religion and ecology and directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with her husband, John Grim. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in Japanese Confucianism. Since 1997 she has been a Research Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. Her concern for the growing environmental crisis, especially in Asia, led her to organize with John Grim a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard (1995-1998).  After the conference series she and Grim founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology at a culminating conference at the United Nations in 1998. They now direct the Forum at Yale where they also teach in a joint master's program in religion and ecology. Tucker and Grim studied world religions with Thomas Berry and are the managing trustees of the Thomas Berry Foundation. To bring Berry's work forward she has also worked closely with evolutionary philosopher, Brian Swimme, for some 25 years. Together they have created a multi-media project called Journey of the Universe which consists of an HD film, a DVD series of interviews, and a website. The companion book which they authored is published by Yale University Press (2011). She is also a co-editor of another volume bringing science and religion together, When Worlds Converge (Open Court, 2002).  Tucker has been involved with the Earth Charter since its inception. She served on the International Earth Charter Drafting Committee from 1997-2000 and is a member of the Earth Charter International Council.  She also serves on the Advisory Boards of Orion Magazine, the Garrison Institute, and Climate Central.

Peter Victor, author of Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster, is a Professor in Environmental Studies at York University. He has worked for over 40 years in Canada and abroad on economy and environment as an academic, consultant and public servant. Dr. Victor was the founding president of the Canadian Society of Ecological Economics and a past-president of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science. Currently he is Chair of Ontario's Greenbelt Council, a member of the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation, the New Economics Institute, and the Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy as well as belonging to several advisory boards in the public and private sectors. In 2011 Dr. Victor's work on ecological economics and managing without growth was recognised through the award of the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences by the Canada Council for the Arts.