Experts Available for Interviews

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

Web: http://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.