Please understand that these are experts available for interviews on their own fields of expertise, not on freegan.info or freeganism in general. For general interviews about freeganism, please contact our media team at ask@freegan.info . Thank you.
Garbage Crisis
Heather Rogers
Author, The Hidden Life of Garbage
Email: heatherrogers@earthlink.net
Heather Rogers is a journalist, filmmaker, and author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (The New Press, 2005). Her documentary film of the same title (2002) screened in festivals around the globe. She is a contributing editor to The Brooklyn Rail, and an editorial advisor to LiP Magazine. Her articles have appeared in The Nation, Utne Reader, Z Magazine, Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, and Third Text.
Global Hunger
Pattrice Jones
Coordinator, Global Hunger Alliance
Phone: (410) 651-4934
Email: info@globalhunger.net
Pattrice Jones coordinates the Global Hunger Alliance, which unites animal, environmental, and social justice organizations to promote plant-based solutions to the worldwide hunger and water crises. She has spoken in venues as diverse as the World Food Summit in Rome, the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, and the Sustainable Development Conference in Islamabad. A founding member of Global Boycott for Peace, Jones agitates for direct economic action against war in the same spirit that she advocates veganism. Pattrice is also the co-coordinator of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Education Center, where she care for chickens and ducks while promoting agriculture reform in a rural region dominated by the poultry industry.
Hunger in New York City
JC Dwyer
Director of Programs and National Service, NYC Coalition Against Hunger
Phone: (212) 825-0028 x217
Email: jcdwyer@nyccah.org
Website: http://nyccah.org
Bio: JC has worked with worked with large NGOs like United Way and the United Nations as well as grassroots groups like Food Not Bombs. He holds a Masters in Applied Social Research. Areas of expertise include hunger, obesity, poverty, humanitarian aid, digital divide, GIS mapping and media. JC has good contacts within NYC’s anti-hunger, nutrition and academic circles.
Mutual Aid and Gift Economies
David Graeber, PhD
Anthropologist, Yale University
Phone: (917) 282-3053
Email: drg9@pantheon.yale.edu
David Graeber, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, among many other scholarly publications. He is active in anti-globalization campaigns and in radical labor organizing with groups like the Direct Action Network, People’s Global Action, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
Primitive Foraging
Jim Mason
author, recovering attorney
Phone: (757) 442-9297
Email: jbmason40@verizon.net
Jim Mason is an author and attorney who focuses on human/animal concerns. He is an expert on subjects including early human economy and diet; domestication of plants/animals; transition to agriculture and historic period “civilization.” His latest book, An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature (Lantern Books, 2005), looks at the historical and cultural roots of the Western belief in God-given dominion over the living world. The book explains how dominionism has made a mess of our relations with animals, with nature, and with each other. In enslaving animals for war and farming, he says, agrarian society broke the ancient bonds and sense of kinship with them. This makes for an alienated, nature-hating culture, Mason argues. It fouls our relations with nature–especially animals, whom we need, he says, as companions, as exercisers of human empathy and nurturing, as feeders and informers of the psyche, and as kin and continuum with the rest of the living world.
Mason is best known for his 1980 book, Animal Factories, written with philosopher, Peter Singer. The book examined Americas brave new world of factory farming in which crowded, drugged animals mass-produce cheap meat, milk and eggs. In the process, Mason and Singer say, animal factories also mass-produce environmental pollution and threats to human health while they destroy independent, diversified farming.
Rainforest Destruction, Consumption, and Everyday Products
Tim Keating
Executive Director, Rainforest Relief
Phone: (917) 543-4064
Email: t.keating @ rainforestrelief.org
Web: http://rainforestrelief.org
Tim Keating serves as a Trustee of Rainforest Relief in addition to his role as director. Since Tim co-founded Rainforest Relief in 1989, the group has become a force preventing logging of rainforests to feed demand for tropical timber imports. In the last five years Rainforest Relief emerged as the nation’s lead organization on this issue. Tim was an advisor to Greenpeace’s Forest Campaign from 2001 to 2002.
Tim has a B.S. in Environmental Science from Stockton State College. Through Rainforest Relief’s lectures, he has directly educated thousands on how everyday products like beef, bananas, coffee, furniture, lumber, aluminum goods, and gold jewelry are causing the destruction of our planet’s rainforests.
Sanitation Worker’s Perspective on Urban Waste
Louie Santiago
Phone: (646) 752-0207
Louie Santiago has been a sanitation worker in New York City for over five years. His garbage hauling routes include many of Manhattan’s enormously wasteful supermarkets. He is disgusted by the waste of useable food resources in a world where so many people are starving.
Wild Foraging
“Wildman” Steve Brill
Naturalist, Environmental Educator, Author
Phone: (914) 835-2153
Email: wildmansteve@bigfoot.com
Web: http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com
World-famous naturalist and author “Wildman” Steve Brill has been leading foraging tours in parks throughout greater New York since 1982. His Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places (HarperCollins, 1994) is considered a classic on the subject. His innovative Wild Vegetarian Cookbook (Harvard Common Press, 2002) is changing the way people think about preparing healthful gourmet food, and his Foraging With the “Wildman” video/DVD series is showing people how it’s all done. But he’s still best known for having been handcuffed and arrested by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park!
Environmental Impacts of Everyday Products
Alan Thein Durning
Executive Director, Sightline Institute
Phone: (206) 447-1880
Web: www.sightline.org
Alan Thein Durning founded Sightline, a not-for-profit research and communication center based in Seattle, in 1993. He contributed significantly to Sightline’s effort to create a new regional index of progress, the Cascadia Scorecard. Durning is lead author or author of nine books including This Place on Earth 2002: Measuring What Matters; This Place on Earth 2001: Guide to a Sustainable Northwest; Green-Collar Jobs: Working in the New Northwest; This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence; The Car and the City; Tax Shift; Misplaced Blame; and Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things.
Prior to founding Sightline, Durning was a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC, where he studied the relationships between social and environmental issues. While at Worldwatch, Durning wrote How Much is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth (1992), which was translated into seven languages. He also coauthored seven State of the World reports, and chapters in Worldwatch Papers on topics ranging from animal agriculture to indigenous peoples.