Helen Storey
Artist & Designer
Helen Storey, British artist and designer. Along with Tony Ryan, Storey created Catalytic Clothing which seeks to explore how clothing and textiles can be used as a catalytic surface to purify air, using nanotechnology applied through the laundry process to anyone’s existing wardrobe of clothes.
The damage we [fashion industry] do is much bigger than other industries. We create stuff over and over again; we constantly set people up for ‘that thing you loved actually doesn’t matter anymore, now have this.’ We set up a hunger that can never be satisfied.
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India Flint
Botanical Alchemist
The prophet of bloom, India Flint is a botanical alchemist and has developed near 0-impact dyes.
I work with cloth, paper, felt, stitch and bio-regionally gathered ecologically sustainable dyes [a long-winded way of saying “windfallen leaves, bark and earth pigments”] as a means of mapping country and making sense of my whirled/world. I regard these processes as a kind of arcadian alchemy.
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Manish Jain
Coordinator of Shikshantar, The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development • Co-founder of Swaraj University
One of the things that is most disturbing to me –on a level of justice and morality – is that you have an institution [education] that is in place globally that is labeling millions and millions of innocent people failures.
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Vandana Shiva
Scholar, Activist, Author
Vandana Shiva is a scholar, environmental activist and anti-globalization author.
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit — profits extracted at the cost of life.
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Patricia Gaulinga
Kichwa (Ecuador) Leader
Patricia Gaulinga, Kichwa (Ecuador) leader of The Movement of Women to defend the Amazon.
We can’t feed our children oil.
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Charles Eisenstein
Author & Speaker
We can go to war against the greedy, but it will solve nothing. It will in fact exacerbate the problem, because it will strengthen the field of Separation, which at its basis is a war against the other, a war against nature, a war against ourselves, a war of each against all.
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Ron Finley
Guerilla Gardener
Ron Finley, Guerilla Gardener, is a designer, artist and gardener, based in Los Angeles. He plants vegetable gardens in abandoned lots, and other places that have been neglected, in South Central LA.
… I grew up eating the garbage that was here. You know, convenience foods. Macaroni. I never liked macaroni. Frozen spinach. We had some fresh food but at the time it was when they were changing the whole food system to be “convenient” for us. I ate McDonald’s, Burger King, coming up. All that stuff. You had no idea what this food was made of and that it would make you sick and in some cases kill you.
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Adebayo C. Akomolafe
Coordinating Curator at the Emergence Network, Special Envoy at International Alliance for Localization and Lecturer at Convenant University
Click here to watch We Will Tell Our Stories
Our disenchantments and failures are truly the portals to new unprecedented worlds; the only way we can power alternative futures is through the energy of disenchantment. We must pierce through the membranes of the familiar, of the approved – only by losing our coordinates and getting generously lost. Our hope for new landscapes will not lie in the centre of the circle to which everyone has turned, but beyond its circumference – in the wilds beyond our fences.
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Lisa Gerrard
Singer & Composer
The Irish-Australian is a part of the music group The Dead Can Dance. She is well-known for her contributions to film music, The Gladiator, Man on Fire and The Insider.
Click here to watch The End (Man On Fire)
I sing in the language of the Heart. It’s an invented language that I’ve had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.
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Michael Reynolds
Biotect
American born biotect, Michael Reynolds, based in New Mexico, U.S. is the creator and designer of the earthship. Reynolds has been referred to as the prophet of the green movement, in his call for “radically sustainable living.”
Click here to visit earthship.com
As a citizen of the earth, I fully have the right to harvest water from the sky, to grow my own food in my own home, to harvest energy from the sun and the wine, to contain and reuse my own waste on my own land, to make shelter comfortable without the use of fossil fuels, and to harvest what others throw away to construct my own house. I am willing to die to defend these rights and to spread the knowledge of how to achieve them to others. If six billion other people said this as well…we would transcend the corporations, the government, and the federal reserve bank. We, the people, would always survive.
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Howard Thurman (1899-1981)
Civil Rights Leader, Educator, Theologian, Author, Philosopher
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
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Renee Stout
Artist
Renee Stout is a mixed media, assemblage artist born in Junction City, Kansas. Residing and working in Washington, D.C., Stouts assemblages explore her personal stories and the African diasporic experience in the United States.
People have begun to acknowledge the influence of Africa on music, art, dress, etc., but spiritual beliefs inspired by African cultures seem to be the last taboo. I think this is because the cultures that people of the African diaspora find themselves in are, for the most part, dominated by Christian-based beliefs. In my opinion, Christianity (ironically) is one of the most intolerant religions when it comes to other belief systems, although I don’t think that’s how it originally started out. I am speaking from where I am when I say that if you are open to anything other than Christianity as a viable system to make sense of your existence, you are looked at with suspicion.
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Guerilla Knitters & Yarn Bombers the world over
It’s the new graffiti art that is taking the world by storm. Unlike traditional graffiti art, this is impermanent and is easily removable.
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Earnestine Shephard
Body Builder
Earnestine Shephard, the oldest female competitive body builder in the world. The Baltimore, Maryland native is 79 years old. She challenges the belief that aging is synonymous with body decline.
I am in better shape now than I was when I was 40 years old.
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Opie Winston (played by Ryan Hurst)
Fictional Character, The Sons of Anarchy
Opie Winston, played by Ryan Hurst, was a character in The Sons of Anarchy, created by Kurt Sutter. The series focuses on an outlaw motorcycle club, situated in the fictional town of Charming, California. Opie was killed in San Joaquin Correctional Facility, in season 5. I haven’t, to this day, been able to watch the scene. I hadn’t felt that kind of disappointment since the priest, Athelstan, was taken out in The Vikings.
From episode 4, Opie recites his vow of love to his bride, Lyla, who becomes his second wife.
With this ring, I vow my love. And I promise always to cherish and protect you. And treat you as good as my leather and ride you as much as my Harley.
