Dr. Alanen is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His primary interests are in landscape history and historic preservation. He has written extensively about cultural landscapes, especially those that feature rural areas, immigrant settlements, early towns plans, and planned communities. The majority of his work had focused on the American Midwest, although he has also written about places elsewhere in North America , as well as Finland , Norway , Australia , and Japan . He is co-author of the book Main Street Ready-Made: The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin; co-editor of Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America; and author of the 2000 field guide for the conference of the Vernacular Architecture Forum held in Duluth, MN. His book The Making of a Model Town: U.S. Steel and Morgan Park, Minnesota will appear next year.

Omie Baldwin is a student services program manager with the University of Wisconsin's University Health Services division of Counseling and Consultation Services. She is a member of the Navajo nation, and co-teaches a course entitled "Environmental Chemistry and Ethnicity," which examines the chemistry of the element uranium in the context of the American Indians who mined it 50 years ago and who continue to suffer from its effects.

Dave Cieslewicz was first elected Mayor of Madison in April, 2003, and re-elected to a second term in April, 2007. Promoting Madison’s environmental activism, Cieslewicz was one of the first mayors in America to sign on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to reduce Madison’s greenhouse gas emissions. He has developed the “Building a Green Capital City” plan for sustainability, purchased the city’s first hybrid diesel-electric buses, and created a new position in city government focused solely on sustainability issues. Under the Mayor’s leadership, Madison was one of the first cities in the nation to adopt “The Natural Step” program to enhance the sustainability of City operations and facilities.

Professor Conway is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madisonsize. Her primary area of research is French cinema and culture. She is interested in the history of film style, in the links between film and other arts, and in the representation of gender in visual culture. She is the author of Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film (2004), and is currently researching the work of Agnès Varda.

Dr. Cronon is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. An environmental historian, he is the author of the award-winning books Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), and has edited and co-edited several more volumes, including Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (1992) and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1996). He is currently completing a book entitled Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism, and is also writing a history of Portage, Wisconsin from the late Pleistocene to the present.

Lloyd Davis is both a distinguished ornithologist and an award-winning scriptwriter and director of natural history documentaries. He has a PhD in Zoology from the University of Alberta, Canada, and he has been a scientist and university lecturer for over twenty years. He is the author of over 90 scientific publications and, as a scientist, he has won numerous awards. He is the senior editor of the landmark text Penguin Biology and the senior author of the treatise Penguins. At present, he is the Director of the world's first university-based course devoted to natural history filmmaking and the communication of science. His current projects include a book called Looking for Darwin, a film about the Antarctic, and a series of newspaper articles titled Nature's Secrets about people who have been advocates for nature.

Daniel B. Gold won the 2002 Sundance "Excellence in Cinematography" Award for his work on Blue Vinyl, which he co-directed and co-produced. That film also garnered him two Emmy Nominations: one for Research, and one for Best Documentary. In 2007, Gold's work as DP will be featured in several new documentaries including "Coma", a 90 minute Moxie Firecracker special on HBO; "New Orleans", an Insignia Films two hour PBS special American Experience; "Saint Misbehavin': The Life and Times of Wavy Gravy"; "Coal Miners", a Barbara Kopple one hour special, and a theatrical release of "Toots Shore: Bigger Than Life", which premiered at Tribeca film festival in 2006. Each summer, Gold teaches two classes at the New School on documentaries and digital cinematography. He recently started his own company called Hidden Rhythm Pictures, which represents him as a Director of Photography and Director/Cameraman.

Filmmaker, activist and educator Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make them personal, resonant, highly charged, and entertaining. Her films, "The Uprising of '34" (Co-directed with George Stoney), the Sundance award winning "Blue Vinyl" (for which she and Co-Director Daniel Gold were nominated for two Emmy's), and its Peabody award winning "prequel" "A Healthy Baby Girl" (a five-year "video-diary" about her experience with DES related cancer), explore home, class, corporate accountability, intergenerational relationships and the ever shrinking border between what is "personal" and what is a critical part of the public record. Helfand is also a co-founder of both Working Films — a national organization that is a dynamic bridge between high-profile non-fiction filmmaking and cutting edge social change organizing — and Chicken & Egg Pictures and Film Fund, which provides small grants and executive producing services to emerging and veteran women filmmakers producing non-fiction and fiction film projects. She is on the faculty at New York University's Undergraduate School of Film & Television, and is joining the University of Wisconsin this fall as an Artist-in-Residence, where she will be co-teaching two courses on film and filmmaking.

Roberta Hill, an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, is a poet, fiction writer and scholar. A professor of English and American Indian Studies, she is the author of two collections of poetry, Star Quilt (Holy Cow! Press, 1984, and a fifteenth anniversary edition due out this year) and Philadelphia Flowers (Holy Cow! Press, 1996). Her poetry has been selected for inclusion in the St. Paul Poetry Garden and the Midwest Express Convention Center in Milwaukee . Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, most recently in The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Luna, and Prairie Schooner. She has written a biography of her grandmother, Dr. Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill, the second American Indian woman physician, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Will Jones is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he teaches courses on the 20th Century United States, Labor History and African American History.  He is author of the award-winning book, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Labor History and the Nation.  He is currently writing a book on race and service work in the post-industrial United States.

Dr. Keller is Assistant Professor of Medical History and History of Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His research interests center on European and colonial medicine and public health, the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the history of the human sciences, and science and race. He is the author of Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (2007).

Dr. Lepowsky is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her research interests include the interplay of cultural and environmental history in the Louisiade Archipelago, which forms the northern boundary of the Coral Sea, including the health consequences of environmental change in the region. In addition, she is conducting archival and ethnographic research on the environmental history of the Los Angeles Basin, as well as on the history and politics of indigenous sacred sites in Southern California and their significance for a series of cultural revitalization movements that span more than two centuries. She is currently at work on a book entitled, Toypurina: The Shaman Who Led a Revolt Against a Spanish Mission and Her Cultural Legacies.

Jen Martin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her academic interests center around environmental history. She is currently completing a dissertation entitled "When the Shark Bites: The Rehabilitation of Sharks in American Cultures and Waters in the Twentieth Century."

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. His first book, The End of Nature (1989) is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. He is the author of many books, including The Age of Missing Information (1992), Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995), Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously (2001), Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2004), and Wandering Home (2005). His most recent book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, was published this year. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Dr. Curt Meine serves as Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation and as Research Associate with the International Crane Foundation (both of which are located in Baraboo, Wisconsin), and as Director for Conservation Biology and History with the Chicago-based Center for Humans and Nature. Meine received his bachelor’s degree from DePaul University and his graduate degrees from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has authored and edited several books, including Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (1988), The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries (1999), and Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (2004). Meine is a past member of the board of governors of the Society for Conservation Biology and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Conservation Biology and Environmental Ethics. He is also active in local conservation as a founder and member of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance in Sauk County, Wisconsin.

Dr. Mitman is William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research and teaching interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in twentieth-century America across scientific and popular culture. He is the author of The State of Nature: Ecology and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (1992), Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (1999), and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (2007). He has written extensively on nature and film, and is currently serving as the first director of the University's new Center For Culture, History, and Environment.

Randy Olson holds a PhD in biology from Harvard University, and specializes in the ecology of marine invertebrate larvae of such species as starfish, corals, and sea squirts. He has published over twenty research papers, including studies of larval dispersal, nutrition, and settlement. Dr. Olson graduated from the U.S.C. Cinema School in 1997 and recently wrote and directed the feature documentary, Flock of Dodos, which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in early 2007. Olson also co-founded The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, which is a partnership between ocean conservation and Hollywood to explore more innovative ways to communicate the crisis facing our oceans. Shifting Baseline's projects have included short films and television commercials written and directed by Olson, including The Ocean Symphony PSA conducted by Jack Black, recently featured on Youtube.com, producing nearly a half million views.

Dr. Raffa is Professor in the Department of Entomology and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Forest Ecology & Management at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His research focuses on forest entomology, insect ecology, plant-insect interactions, and chemical ecology. He co-edited the volume Sawfly Life History Adaptations to Woody Plants (1993), and has authored numerous scientific publications.

Dr. Rajan is a humanist and social scientist, whose research focuses on environmental issues in governance, corporate responsibility, globalization, entrepreneurship, technology choice, and risk and disaster management. Educated at Delhi (BA Mathematics, MA, Philosophy); Oxford (D.Phil., Environmental History); Berkeley (post doc in Geography); Cornell (post doc in Science and Technology Studies and Global Environmental Studies) and the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, (post doc in Environmental History and Science and Technology Studies), he is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Provost of College Eight. Rajan has served on the editorial board of Environment and History, as Program Chair for the 2003 Annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History; as a manuscript referee for several leading academic journals and presses, and as a referee for renowned research agencies such as the National Science Foundation. Rajan has also served as the President of the Board of Directors of Pesticide Action Network, North America (PANNA); on the Board of International Media Project, which produces the weekly radio news program, Making Contact; and as a member of the city of Santa Cruz’s Green Building Committee. He co-founded, the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, a documentation and information center on the gas disaster, in 1985, and served on the core group of the Indian environmental action group, Kalpavriksh, during the 1980s. Rajan also writes periodic essays in the popular news media.

Dr. Sanchez is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century Luso-Brazilian narrative, contemporary women writers, visual culture and gender studies. Her book Utopias Desmascaradas: O Mito do Bom Selvagem e a Procura do Homem Natural na Obra de Almeida Garrett is forthcoming with the Portuguese National Press. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the creation and reception of the Brazilian film star and singer Carmen Miranda in the United States from 1939 to the present day.

Dietram A. Scheufele is Professor of Life Sciences Communication and Journalism & Mass Communication and a member of the steering committee of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He is also Wisconsin PI of the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU).  Scheufele’s work deals with public attitudes toward science and technology. This includes numerous studies exploring the public opinion dynamics and media coverage surrounding nanotechnology, stem cell research, GMOs, and other emerging technologies.  He currently serves as a member of the Nanotechnology Technical Advisory Group to the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Sarita Siegel has produced and directed documentaries and dramatic films for the past 10 years in America, New Zealand and England. She and her partner founded Alchemy Films in 1994, which has produced award-winning cross-cultural films on natural history subjects with an awareness of conservation. Some of their film titles include The Split Horn (2001), The Disenchanted Forest (2002), Destroying Angel (1995) and The Beloved (1997). In addition, she serves as Vice President of Media Development of the Balikpapan Orangutan Society and is a member of Filmmakers for Conservation. Siegel is joining the University of Wisconsin this fall as an Artist-in-Residence, where she will be co-teaching two courses on film and filmmaking.

Jeff Spitz is the faculty coordinator of the Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary Film at Columbia College Chicago. His documentary The Return of Navajo Boy premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, has been widely screened internationally, and was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens. The film triggered a federal investigation into uranium contamination on the Navajo Reservation and won honors including the Programmer's Choice Award at the 2000 Planet-in-Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario. Spitz has directed several other documentaries including the PBS special From the Bottom Up (1991). He is a partner at the communications firm Amdur Spitz and Associates (ASA), and co-founder of Groundswell Education Films which is producing the Robben Island Singers Film and Concert project. Spitz received a BA from University of California Los Angeles and an MA in English from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Walker is Professor in and chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University. His research interests include Japanese environmental and medical history and the history of East Asian science. He is the author of The Lost Wolves of Japan (2005) and the co-author of Japanimals: History And Culture in Japan's Animal Life (2005).