Speakers

Plenary speakers

Keynote speakers

Invited panelists, roundtable speakers & respondents

Sara Alexander
Sara Alexander is Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Forensic Science and Archaeology and Director of African Studies at Baylor University. Trained in Anthropology and Environmental Studies, she works with a number of international NGOs in development work focusing on food security, livelihood security, social connectedness and vulnerability. She is currently collaborating with Susan Stonich on research identifying the resilience of vulnerable households to climate related shocks in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System.

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Patricia Allen
Patricia Allen is Director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research addresses socioeconomic structures and conditions that constrain or enable social equity in sustainable food systems, such as class, gender and race intersections in food labor and localization. She is the author of Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System (2004) and editor of Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability (1993).

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Keith Aoki
Keith Aoki is Professor of Law at UC Davis. Professor Aoki sat on the editorial board for the Harvard Environmental Law Review and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He then practiced law for two years at Hale and Dorr, a Boston firm specializing in technology law. He is interested in the intersection of critical theory and the law. His article, "(Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship," appeared in the Stanford Law Review.

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Dan Armstrong
Dan Armstrong is a novelist and the editor of the website Mud City Press, an online literary and environmental magazine with a focus on sustainable food production. He is also a member of the Lane County Food Policy Council and a writer for the Southern Willamette Bean and Grain Project. He has a degree in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and has published four novels Prairie Fire, Taming the Dragon, Puddle of Love, and Chain of Souls.

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Anita Azarenko
Anita is Professor and Department Head of the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University.  The Department of Horticulture is a comprehensive department with active research, Extension, and teaching missions with emphasis on ecological and sustainable cropping systems and landscapes.  The department serves an extremely diverse and changing high-value horticulture, specialty crop sector.  Anita is responsible for strategic planning, program development, priority staffing, public relations, marketing, and other activities that enhance or serve the Horticulture Department, faculty, and programs.  She also conducts research on integrated and organic tree fruit farming systems, especially in sweet cherry cropping systems, floral biology, and orchard floor and soil management systems.  With her husband, they are stewards of a small direct-market farm that grows organic fruit and hazelnuts, and pasture raised beef for local retail and farmers’ markets and schools, and grow hay and timber in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Anita holds a PhD, MS, and BS in horticulture from the University of Maryland.  She has been at OSU since October 1986 as the on-campus pomologist with a three-way appointment in research, teaching, and Extension until 2003 at which time she became the department head.

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Christopher Bacon
Christopher M. Bacon was a post-doctoral researcher with the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley from 2008 until 2010. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Policy Institute at Santa Clara University. His current work focuses on the role of smallholder cooperatives and alternative agri-food networks in enabling more sustainable livelihoods and reducing hunger. After graduating with a degree in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz, Christopher continued participatory action research in Mesoameirca for more than a decade, taught university courses, consulted and contributed to developing a campus-wide hands-on sustainability curriculum. He is lead author of Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America (MIT Press).

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Judy BlueHorse Skelton
Educator and herbalist Judy BlueHorse Skelton (Nez Perce/Cherokee) shares her passion for plants and healing, focusing on traditional and contemporary uses of native plants for food, medicine, ceremony and developing healthy lifeways. Judy is author of six collections of essays for teachers, including Native America: A Sustainable Culture (1999) and Lewis & Clark Through Native American Eyes (2003). She wrote and recorded segments on Health & Healing and Sacred Landscapes for Wisdom of the Elders radio programs, airing on Public Broadcasting and AIROS (American Indian Radio on Satellite). She is on the faculty at Portland State University, teaching the senior capstones "Environmental Education Through Native American Lenses" and "Learning Gardens and Civic Affairs" and the undergraduate courses "Theory and Practice of Sustainability" and "Intro to Leadership for Sustainability."

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Anthony Boutard / Ayers Creek Farm
Anthony Boutard, together with his wife Carol, owns and operates Ayers Creek Farm, located 45 minutes west of Portland in the Wapato Valley. The farm grows vegetables, legumes, grains, plums, table grapes and berries, all Oregon Tilth Certified Organic. Their fruit, vegetables and preserves are found in Portland Area stores. They also sell to restaurants and small processors and are summer and winter vendors at the Hillsdale Farmers' Market.

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Michelle Branch
Michelle Branch is writing her Ph.D. dissertation about food culture in nineteenth-century America, with an emphasis on the social organization of urban food spaces in New York City, Philadelphia and Boston. During the Spring of 2009, Michelle designed and taught a Berkeley undergraduate seminar, one of the few of its kind nationally, examining a cultural history of food and eating across Britain, France, and the U.S. from the nineteenth-century to present.  Currently a doctoral candidate in U.S. History at University of California at Berkeley, Michelle also holds a J.D. and an A.B. in American Studies, both from Stanford University. She serves on the board of City Slicker Farms, an urban farm program focused on food justice and self-sufficiency in Oakland, California.

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Rachel Bristol
Rachel Bristol is CEO of Oregon Food Bank. She began her work in hunger relief in 1983 as a VISTA volunteer with Oregon Food Share. As Acting Executive Director in 1988, she played a key role in the merger with Interagency Food Bank to form the Oregon Food Bank. She was appointed to the Oregon Legislative Task Force on Hunger Relief at its inception in 1989, serving for 10 years, including several years as Chair. She served from 1997-2000 on the Board of Directors for America’s Second Harvest (now called Feeding America), the national network of food banks. Under Rachel’s leadership Oregon Food Bank was named “The Most Admired Oregon Nonprofit” in a statewide survey of CEOs conducted by the Portland Business Journal in 2004. In 2009, Rachel received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Oregon and was named Most Admired Oregon Non-Profit CEO by the Portland Business Journal.

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Les Brown
For twelve years, Les Brown has worked with Tribal fishers from the CRITFC member tribes (Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Yakama) to help create greater marketing opportunities and higher prices for their tribal harvested fish. By promoting quality handling, developing working relationships with fish buyers, good media promotions and, recently, good market conditions, the prices for tribally harvested salmon have increased over 300%. Columbia River tribal salmon is now being served and sold throughout the nation with one container (over 30,000 pounds) shipped to Europe during last year’s season. Prior to Les’s work with CRITFC, he had over 30 years of experience creating, organizing and directing large and small scale community events and concerts. In 2002, Les was interviewed and selected from an international pool of applicants to be one of seven cast coordinators for Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown discovered her passion for food and agriculture as a student at UC Davis. While completing her B.S. in International Agricultural Development she had the opportunity to work on the student-run organic farm, visit agricultural systems from California to Chile, and develop a deeper understanding of sustainable agriculture. After graduating, she moved with her husband to Southwest Washington to build and manage a small, diversified, organic farm. Since moving to Portland 3 years ago, Sarah has worked with a number of agriculture education programs including Zenger Farm’s Emerging Farmer Training Program, Oregon Tilth’s Organic Education Center, and OSU Extension. She recently began work as an Organic Conservation Specialist in a joint position with Oregon Tilth and NRCS. Now at home on their 2-acre urban farm, Sarah and her husband grow vegetables for a CSA and local restaurants, harvest fruit in abundance, and raise a diversity of livestock. 

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Claire Bowen
Claire Bowen is Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture.  She is currently completing her first book, "Between Pole and Tropic: Writing Suspension, 1945-1955."  Her latest research explores the concept of the "generational" across twentieth-century literary, artistic, technological, and environmental discourses. Bowen has published on William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop; she blogs on contemporary art, environmental ethics, and war writing for Arcade: A Digital Salon. She has worked in urban greening in Chicago, and literacy advocacy in San Francisco.  She will soon bring both of these emphases to bear in the classroom, creating new modules for literature courses in collaboration with the Dickinson Center for Sustainability Education.

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Daniel Buck
Before coming to the University of Oregon, Professor Buck earned a PhD in Geography at UC Berkeley, held a postdoctoral fellowship in East Asian Studies at Columbia University and for five years was University Lecturer in the Human Geography of China at the University of Oxford. He is currently researching the globalization of food systems in China and East Asia. Past publications explore how the restructuring of industrial networks changed country and city in Shanghai; China’s urbanization and transition to capitalism through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America; peak oil through the relationship between natural resources, technology change, and capitalism; the agrarian roots of flexible production networks in Taiwan; and the conventionalization of organic agriculture in California.

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Sarah Cantril
Sarah Cantril is the Founder and Executive Director of Huerto de la Familia (The Family Garden). She graduated from the University of Oregon in 1990 with a Bachelors of Arts degree and an Honors College Independent Study " Ethnicity and Gender in American Society." She also received a Masters of Administrative Social Work in 1995 from Portland State University. She has been a Master Gardener since 2000. Her most important work is raising her two children; she lives and gardens outside of Eugene, Oregon.

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Megan Carney
Megan Carney is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on urban food security in the United States. From 2009-10, she served as Sustainable Food Coordinator for UCSB Housing and Residential Dining Services, overseeing the Real Food Challenge campus intern program. Megan is also founding coordinator of the Santa Barbara Food Policy Council. She is a member of the "Food and the Body" UC Multicampus research group and she has two articles on food sovereignty forthcoming in 2011. She received her B.A. from UCLA and her M.A. from UCSB, both in Anthropology.

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Allison Carruth
Allison Carruth is an Assistant Professor of English and a core faculty member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Professor Carruth received her PhD from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Barbara. Her interests include environmental literature and media, modernist and postmodern culture, social media and globalization theory. She also has done extensive research on the cultural and environmental politics of food in the contemporary period. Her book manuscript is entitled Global Appetites: Imagining the Power of Food. She is currently working on a second book project that traces environmentalism and sustainability through contemporary culture, exploring emerging ideas of green cities, urban farms and clean energy. The project looks especially at how developments in biotechnology are shaping these ideas as they are articulated in literature, architecture and BioArt.

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Teara Farrow Ferman
Teara Farrow Ferman is the Cultural Resources Protection Program Manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). She is a descendant of the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Walla Walla, and Wintu Tribes and is an enrolled member of the CTUIR.  She has worked for the CTUIR since 1994 and for the Cultural Resources Protection Program since 1996. Teara has been the Program Manager since October 1, 2004.  Her main emphasis has been on gathering and managing tribal oral histories and protection and managing places of significant to the CTUIR and its tribal members.  Her goal is twofold: to be able to utilize oral history knowledge to protect all cultural resources, “not just the archaeology but the roots, the berries, the fish, and all that we depend on for survival.  This also includes the need to protect and preserve places where our ancestors were buried." Teara and her staff work closely with Department of Natural Resources staff to inform them of traditional uses area include First Food resources areas through the use of oral histories and historical, ethnographic, and archaeological records.

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Gail Feenstra
Gail Feenstra is the Food Systems Coordinator at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) and University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP).   SAREP’s Food Systems Program encourages the development of regional food systems that link farmers, consumers and communities. Feenstra’s research and outreach includes: farm-to-school evaluation, regional food system distribution, food access/ food security for low-income populations, food system assessments and, most recently, food carbon footprint analysis.  Feenstra has a doctorate in nutrition education from Teachers College, Columbia University with an emphasis in public health. She enjoys shopping at farmers markets, gardening, cooking meals using local ingredients and watching her four backyard chickens.

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Megan Fehrman
Megan Fehrman is the Program Director and Grassroots Organizer for Friends of Family Farmers (FoFF), a statewide education and advocacy organization working to promote and protect socially responsible agriculture in Oregon. Megan runs the Farmer Campaign for FoFF and has spent much time on the road talking to farmers and ranchers in communities across Oregon to better understand the issues and roadblocks they are facing while trying to run a socially responsible and economically viable farm business. Recently, this has all coalesced in the Agricultural Reclamation Act, a roadmap for the future of food and agriculture in Oregon that is based on family-scale farms and ranches, food security, rural economic viability and cultural connectivity. Megan is lucky enough to live in the Little Applegate Valley on a vegetable and seed farm where she gets to dig in the dirt and has access to an amazing agricultural community and fantastic food.

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Lynne Fessenden
Lynne Fessenden is the Executive Director of the Willamette Farm and Food Coalition (WFFC), a community nonprofit in Lane County, Oregon, facilitating greater understanding of the social, economic and environmental impacts of our food choices. WFFC promotes the purchase of locally grown and produced foods to keep small farms viable and to strengthen the local economy. In the past four years under her leadership, WFFC has: tripled its annual budget; implemented an award-winning Farm to School Program in four districts; upgraded and enhanced its annual publication, the Locally Grown guide; brought farmers, distributors and institutional food buyers together to overcome barriers to getting local foods into our schools, colleges and hospitals; and partnered in the Southern Willamette Valley Bean & Grain Project.

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Andy Fisher
Bio coming soon.

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Janet Fiskio
Janet Fiskio is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, where she teaches classes on agrarian thought, environmental justice and climate change. She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Nature, Knowledge, Justice, which examines the communal epistemology of environmental justice as formulated and expressed through literary innovation. Janet is a board member of the New Agrarian Center and is engaged in community-based learning collaborations with local urban gardening organizations in the rust belt of Lorain County.

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Anne-Lise François
Anne-Lise François is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1999. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th and early 20th centuries. She has taught courses on the modern period in British and American literary history, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, as well as seminars and graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department on European Romanticism and aesthetic theory, and on the writing and epistemology of love.

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David Goldstein
David Goldstein is Assistant Professor of English at York University in Toronto, where he teaches courses on food studies, Renaissance literature, and poetry writing. He has published scholarly articles on Shakespeare, Emmanuel Levinas, Robert Duncan, and Martha Stewart, and has written numerous restaurant reviews and popular articles about food for such publications as The New York Sun and Saveur. David is currently completing a book about eating and ethics in Renaissance England.

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Rob Handy
Rob Handy moved to Lane County as a teenager and has lived in Eugene his entire adult life. He has 25 years of service as a volunteer with nonprofit and community organizations, and before being elected to the Lane County Board in 2008, owned and managed a landscaping consulting/ contracting service. Prior to joining the Board, Handy's volunteer service included: Committed Partners for Youth mentor, Eugene Neighborhood Leaders Council co-chair, River Road Community Organization chair. As a Commissioner, Handy serves as a Representative on several diverse commissions and committees, including Human Services Commission and Commission on Children and Families, advocating for the most vulnerable in our community: children and families living in poverty, veterans, communities of color, and battered women.
Handy is an advocate for a vibrant local economy, supporting funding for Ninkasi Brewing, Acrimoto, Next-Step Recycling, and EDev to help leverage investments in local job growth and facility expansion

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Leslie Hatfield
Leslie Hatfield is senior editor at GRACE. The primary blogger and editor of Ecocentric, Leslie has also contributed to Edible Chesapeake and The Ethicurean, and she has served as lead author of the publication Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement.

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Deb Johnson-Shelton
Deb Johnson-Shelton, Ph.D., serves as President of the Lane County Food Policy Council. She is Principal Investigator of the Communities and Schools Together (CAST) for Childhood Obesity Prevention project funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. CAST is using community-based participatory research with a community-school partnership to develop a geospatial community health information database system to maintain research on the social, neighborhood design and food system environments to guide locally-based interventions for improving child health.

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Young Kim
Young Kim is the Executive Director of the Fondy Food Center, a nonprofit organization that connects inner city Milwaukee residents to local, fresh food. Kim is also President of the Board of the Community Food Security Coalition. Born and raised in the Deep South, he is a second-generation Korean American and a self-described “hardcore foodie.” Kim is particularly interested in exploring how race, class and culture determine how people get food. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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Jennifer Burns Levin
Jennifer Burns Levin holds a Ph.D. from Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, and teaches literature in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Professor Levin's research interests include British literature and culture, Anglo-American and Continental modernism, James Joyce, sexuality studies, periodical studies, and culinary literature. Her work on alternative sexualities has been published in various journals and books. She has been awarded research fellowships from SUNY-Buffalo, the Chancellor and Regents of the University of California, and the James J. Harvey fund for gay and lesbian studies at U.C. Irvine. She spoke on imported Irish produce at the Zurich Joyce Foundation in 2010, and organized a special session on food and desire in the 20th century for the 2011 Modern Language Association convention, at which she will discuss the iconic fruits of modernism. Professor Levin also regularly writes about local cuisine, sustainable food practices, and other delicious matters for the Eugene Weekly and Register-Guard. Her food blog, Culinaria Eugenius, was rated one of the top local blogs in Eugene Weekly's Best of Eugene 2009. She recently appeared on Food for Thought, a radio show on Eugene’s NPR affiliate.

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Tom Lively
Tom Lively and his brother David moved to Oregon from Arizona and started farming organically in 1979. Tom was an early participant of the Lane County Farmers’ Market, which has flourished in Eugene for almost 30 years. In that same year, Tom worked with fellow growers to form Organically Grown Co-op (OGC) as a non-profit support organization for organic farmers looking to pool purchases of inputs and supplies and share information. Within a few years it morphed into a producers' co-op, and, in 1983, OGC established a centralized distribution center and started up wholesale trade. In 1988, Tom Lively became an employee of OGC, and started what has now become a 22-year career in sales and marketing. In addition to his work at OGC, Tom and his wife Megas Mac Donald operate Lively Organic Farm, a small-certified organic farm where they produce tree fruit, berries and mixed vegetables. Lively currently serves on the Board of Organically Grown Company.

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Galen Martin
Galen Martin received his PhD from University of California at Davis in human and environmental geography. He has been designing and teaching international courses at the University of Oregon for most of the past two decades.  Current classes include Issues in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Connections.  Interest in food and agriculture is both academically and experientially based.  Dr. Martin spent his pre-collegiate years on a wheat and livestock farm in North Dakota where he also worked for the US Soil Conservation Service.  He and his family now tend a herd of grass-fed sheep and goats as well as garden on a small farm near Eugene, Oregon.  Extensive international experience has allowed for study and observation of agricultural practices throughout the world.  He currently serves on the Lane County Food Policy Council.

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Jon Matthews
Jon Matthews, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, received degrees in BA Business (Accounting) from Eastern Washington University, an MBA from Washington State University and a JD from the University of Idaho. He has worked as the Nez Perce Tribe’s economic development planner and as the general manager of the tribal enterprises. He also served on the Tribe’s Enterprise Board, an elected position, for 2 terms. He was elected to serve as Chairman for about 4 years during these terms. Mr. Matthews has also worked as a business consultant for tribal organizations. Since 1994, he has worked at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), serving as the Director of Finance & Operations. His responsibilities include supervising finance, operations, in-lieu and fishing access site maintenance, and the marketing of salmon.  He works on various issues relating to these functional areas on behalf of the Commission. Mr. Matthews has also served on numerous boards working to advance Native American issues.     

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Theresa May
Dr. Theresa May is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She is one of a handful of scholars working at the intersection of ecology and performance. Theresa is Artistic Director of Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS), which presented the 2009 Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and Symposium. Her community-based theatre work, as with Salmon Is Everything and the Women and Rivers Project, explores the connections between human and biotic communities in the Pacific Northwest. Her publications include Greening Up Our Houses (with Larry K. Fried), the first book on sustainable theatre management. Her articles on the intersection of theatre and ecology have appeared in Theatre Topics, New England Theatre Journal, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, On Stage Studies, American Drama, and Theatre Studies. From 1988 to 1996, she was founding artistic director of Theatre in the Wild in Seattle, where she devised earth-centered, site specific performances.

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Mike McKenzie-Bahr
Mike McKenzie-Bahr is the Lane County Community and Economic Development Coordinator. He works with local businesses, governments, non-profits and community members to identify, plan and finance job creation projects including business recruitment and expansion, rural community infrastructure, brownfield redevelopment, tourism development, low income housing rehabilitation and renewable energy projects. Lane County Community and Economic Development was a partner in the Lane County Local Food Market Analysis. To assist meeting the identified next steps of the Food Market Analysis, Lane County has awarded three grants to local food companies and created a Local Food Coordinator position.

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Sarah Mizejewski
Sarah Mizejewski is a Community and Economic Development Specialist for Lane County. A portion of her position includes acting as a local food coordinator for the County. The primary goals of this position are to increase local food production and processing capacity, network with existing businesses and others in the local food community to determine needs, and develop local food policy for the County. Sarah is also a graduate student in the Community and Regional Planning program and the University of Oregon and studies local food planning and policy.

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Tammy Morales
Tammy Morales is the principal of Urban Food Link, a consulting firm specializing in connecting communities to healthy food. Tammy loves to roll up her sleeves and lend her strategic thinking and resourcefulness to supporting local food economies and equitable food access. She is currently launching a corner store conversion project that aims to build demand for healthy food throughout south King County in Seattle. Tammy's work has earned her a solid reputation as a food systems leader in the Puget Sound region, where she continues to advise policy makers at the local, county and regional levels.

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Geraldine Moreno
Geraldine Moreno (PhD; CNS) is a Full Professor of Anthropology and has been employed at the University of Oregon since 1974. Her research is located at the intersection of nutritional anthropology, human biology and medical anthropology. She is a member of a research team working on a NIH funded community based participatory project focused on childhood obesity prevention. She is also actively engaged in a Byrd Foundation study investigating the role of Vitamin B on cognitive ability in elderly Hispanics. Dr. Moreno has been involved in food insecurity work and research in Thailand, Ecuador and the United States. Her previous research in northeastern Thailand focused on the relationship among gender, cultural and economic transformation, and food habits, including the reliance on wild food. Dr. Moreno has publications in Ecology of Food and Nutrition; Qualitative Health Research; The Journal of Ethnobiology and Agriculture and Human Values.

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Jorge Navarro
Jorge Navarro, raised in Los Angeles, California, is a first generation Mexican American. He has worked with the Latino community for over 40 years. His experience includes having been Executive Director of Centro Latino Americano, a drug and alcohol counselor, gambling counselor, a pre-school teacher, musician, sound engineer and owner of a small restaurant, Cafe Navarro. He has volunteered for and served on the board of directors of many local community organizations. He is currently working as Co Director of Programs and Development for Community Alliance of Lane County.

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Ethan Nelson
Ethan Nelson is the City of Eugene's Waste Prevention and Green Building Manager. Ethan recently started the City of Eugene's Urban Agriculture program with the objective of diverting organic waste from the landfill by increasing gardening within the city. In addition to his work with the City, Ethan has over 12 years experience in facility operations, biofuels research, and youth conservation programs. While in graduate school, Ethan conducted research on European anaerobic digestion technology and public policy at the University of Oslo and conducted an initial feasibility study for the conversion of food waste to energy within the Eugene Springfield Metro Area.

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Will Newman II
Will Newman co-founded Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust (OSALT) in 1996. Will currently serves as a Member of the Board and as the Research and Education Director. Will is a life member of the Home Orchard Society and has served as Secretary and as Treasurer. He is an active speaker and participant in Master Gardeners, Master Recyclers, Master Food Preservers, Home Orchard Society and Oregon Tilth. He designed and managed an award-winning pre-apprenticeship level training program for Portland Public Schools, providing useful, on-site trades training for middle and high school students. He has also served as the Director of CISCO, the Chicano-Indian Study Center of Oregon, where he developed similar course work, refurbished the facility, lived through an audit by HUD and worked with a diverse group of European American, Native American and Hispanic clients.

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Bob Parker
Bob Parker is a Managing Director with the UO the Community Service Center (CSC) and Program Director of the Community Planning Workshop.  Over the last 20 years, Parker has managed more than 300 policy and planning analysis projects with communities and state officials throughout Oregon.  Community Planning Workshop is known widely throughout Oregon as one of the state’s critical policy analysis resources, connecting expertise of University faculty and students with communities and agencies.  These relationships, as well as the vast policy analysis experience, help CPW provide service to communities and organizations throughout Oregon. Parker is also a principal of the University of Oregon’s Economic Development Center—a partnership with the US Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration which provides technical assistance related to economic and business development to Oregon communities.

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Kitty Piercy
Kitty Piercy has been Mayor of Eugene since January 2005.  Prior to being Mayor, she taught school, advocated for the rights of women and children, and was elected three times as State Representative, serving the last as House Minority Leader.  She has served on many local boards and task forces, including 13 years on the Oregon Commission for Childcare and the Lane County Commission on Children and Families.  Mayor Piercy is a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors where she works with mayors across the country on issues as diverse as climate change, energy policy, peace and justice and public safety. She and her husband David have three grown children and two grandchildren.  She believes there can be no greater honor than serving as Mayor of  Eugene.

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Wenix Red Elk
Wenix Red Elk has an Associates and Bachelor degree in Museum Studies/Cultural Resources Management from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe NM and a Masters in Organizational Management from the University of Phoenix AZ. Currently, Wenix is the Education Outreach Coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) where she coordinates and implements First Food related education activities and events for DNR’s seven programs. Wenix has over 10 years experience in Natural Resources. As a young adult, Wenix worked for the Earth Conservation Corps, Salmon Corps branch restoring and revitalizing plant and salmon habitats, watersheds and native vegetation to its natural habitat to stabilize fish populations and reintroduction of wild salmon stock back into watershed areas. Wenix has learned about her culture and tribal traditions from the time of birth and has taught over 150 cultural classes. Wenix has been a traditional food gatherer for 21 years.

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Chris Schreiner
Chris Schreiner is Oregon Tilth's Executive Director. He grew up working on his family's farm, Schreiner's Iris Gardens, a third generation 200-acre iris nursery in Oregon's Willamette Valley. After completing his degree at the University of Oregon, Chris worked on a small organic farm that grew diverse specialty crops, selling direct to local restaurants and natural food stores. Since 1998, Chris has worked for Oregon Tilth. As the Farm Program Coordinator, he coordinated the certification process for over 400 farms participating in the Oregon Tilth Certified Organic program. As the Quality Control Director, his responsibilities included policy analysis and managing accreditation with the USDA National Organic Program.

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Emily Smith
Emily Smith is an MA candidate in International Studies at the University of Oregon. She is interested in identity, migration, and agriculture. During the summer of 2010, Emily volunteered with a Global Gardens refugee farming project in Boise, Idaho. Currently, she is writing her Master's about a farm run by Somali Bantu Zigua refugees.

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Kara Smith
Kara Smith joined FOOD for Lane County after her graduate studies, which focused on food security in Lane County, and after working for over 15 years in the food service industry. She has volunteered to sit on various city committees, including the Glenwood Citizen Advisory Committee, the Lane County Food Policy Council and as an intern for the City of Eugene’s Planning Department.  Her previous experience before arriving in the area includes teaching Economics, English and International Relations in the Czech Republic. Kara holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Political Science, with a focus on Theory and Public Policy, and a Graduate Certificate in Non-Profit Management.   

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Naomi Starkman
Naomi Starkman is a food policy consultant and founder and editor of Civil Eats. Naomi co-produces Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco, is a board member of 18 Reasons, a nonprofit connecting community through food, and is on the Circle of Friends Council for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. She served as the Director of Communications & Policy at Slow Food Nation ’08 and has worked as a media consultant at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and WIRED magazines. She was previously a senior publicist at Newsweek magazine and was the Director of Communications for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). From 1997 to 2000, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the S.F. Ethics Commission. Naomi works with various clients on food policy and advocacy and is an aspiring organic grower, having worked on several farms.

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Susan Stonich
Susan Stonich is Professor of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Geography and Marine Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Trained in Anthropology and Geography, she has served on many national and international advisory panels including the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Global Change Science Program and the Canadian National Centres of Excellence. Her current research focuses on the political ecology of climate change in the Mesoamerican Reef System.

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Amy L. Tigner
Amy L. Tigner is Assistant Professor in the English Department at University of Texas, Arlington. Tigner has published articles in Modern Drama, English Literary Renaissance, Drama Criticism, Milton Quarterly and Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700. Forthcoming is Tigner's book, England's Paradise, which traces how England re-envisioned itself as a new Garden of Eden while facing environmental degradation of the early modern period. Her next book project is entitled From the Garden to the Kitchen: Gardening and Eating in the Renaissance.

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Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, activist and organizer based in the Hudson Valley. Over the past two years, she has produced and directed a documentary film about the young farmers who are reclaiming, restoring, retrofitting and respecting this country of ours. The film, titled "The Greenhorns," grew into a small nonprofit organization that currently produces events, media and new media for and about the young farming community. Greenhorns runs a weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network, a popular blog, a wiki-based resource guide for beginning farmers, a GIS-based mapping project and dozens of mixers and educational events for young farmers all around the country. Severine attended Pomona College and University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a B.S. in Conservation/AgroEcology. She co- founded the Pomona Organic Farm and founded UC Berkeley's Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology and is a proud co-founder of the National Young Farmers Coalition.

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Cynthia Torres
Cynthia Torres began her career in agriculture in a grain silo on an organic farm in Boulder County. She is now the Director of the Colorado Farmers Market Association and a former Fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. She serves on the Boulder County Food & Agriculture Policy Council, the Colorado Farmers Market Working Group and the Community Food Security Coalition board of directors.

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Nancy Toth
Nancy Toth works on drinking water source protection in the environmental management department at Eugene Water & Electric Board. Nancy and her colleagues work with agencies, organizations, and watershed stakeholders to develop innovative ways of addressing threats to water quality. Nancy has a BA in Geography from Dartmouth College and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon.

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Conner Voss
Conner Voss’s interest in agriculture started with childhood cherry tomato wars. During his time at UC Davis, working towards a B.A. in International Relations, Conner gravitated towards an education that brought him closer to the land, his food, and a special farmer friend. In the years since, Conner has enjoyed honing his growing skills in the Pacific Northwest, where he's managed a variety of organic operations.  Currently, Conner works as the Demonstration Garden Coordinator for Oregon Tilth––gardening, teaching, and learning alongside Willamette Valley residents of all ages, constantly inspired by the beauty and abundance of biologically sound agriculture. At home, he and his wife Sarah thrive in developing a small farm business together, and are happiest when savoring a homegrown meal in the company of friends and family.

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Louise Westling
Louise Westling is Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon whose research focuses on landscape imagery in American fiction, Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology and critical animal studies. Books include Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor and The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Recent articles are "Darwin in Arcadia: Human-Animal Intertwining from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf;" "Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman;"  "Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Ecopoetics and the Problem of Humanism;" and "Merleau-Ponty's Human-Animality Intertwining and the Animal Question." She is completing a book on Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language.

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Mary Wood
Mary Christina Wood is Philip H. Knight Professor of Law, Faculty Director for the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program and a 2007-08 Luvaas Faculty Fellow at the University of Oregon School of Law. She teaches property law, natural resources law, public trust law, federal Indian law, public lands law, wildlife law and hazardous waste law. She is the Founding Director of the school's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program and is Faculty Leader of the Program's Conservation Trust Project, Sustainable Land Use Project and Native Environmental Sovereignty Project. In 1994, she received the University's Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching and, in 2002, she received the Orlando Hollis Faculty Teaching Award. Professor Wood is a co-author of a leading textbook on natural resources law (West, 2006) and has published extensively on climate crisis, natural resources and native law issues. She is a frequent speaker on global warming issues and has received national and international attention for her sovereign trust approach to global climate policy. Professor Wood is currently working on a book entitled, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age.

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Stephen Wooten
Stephen Wooten is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Oregon, where he has been since 2001. Dr. Wooten is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests include: local-global dynamics, agrarian change, political economy and ecology, and expressive culture. Dr. Wooten conducts ethnographic field research in West Africa (Mali and Cote d'Ivoire). His research publications include: "Colonial Administration and the Ethnography of the Family in the French Soudan" in Cahiers d'etudes africaines, "Antelope Headdresses and Champion Farmers: Negotiating Meaning and Identity through the Bamana Ciwara Complex" in African Arts and "Losing Ground: Gender Relations, Commercial Horticulture and Threats to Local Plant Diversity in Rural Mali" in a forthcoming edited volume entitled, Women and Plants: Gender Relations in Biodiversity Management and Conservation.

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“Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini decided that this globalization of McDonald’s needed to be countered by a globalization of diversity.”

– Plenary Speaker Dr.Vandana Shiva, Founder and Director, Navdanya