YES! Contributing Editors and Advisers

These thought leaders and authors contribute regularly to YES! with expertise, potential source and story leads, and writing of their own.

Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) is a writer and social change activist. He is the author, most recently, of How to Be Alive: A Guide To The Kind of Happiness That Helps The World. A sought-after speaker by wide-ranging audiences, he also consults with businesses on improving eco-friendly and human-centered practices. He ran for the US House of Representatives in New York’s 8th Congressional District in 2012, is the founder of the No Impact Project, a board member of Transportation Alternatives, an advisory council member of 350.org and a dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him at ColinBeavan.com and @ColinBeavan on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

adrienne maree brown is a writer, activist, doula-in-training, and singer/artist living in Detroit. She was executive director of The Ruckus Society from 2006-2010, and now sits on its board. She is also on the boards of Allied Media Projects, Third Wave Foundation, and Common Fire. She is a facilitator for the Detroit Food Justice Task Force and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. She was a national co-coordinator for the 2010 US Social Forum. Adrienne is obsessed with learning and developing models for action, community strength, movement building, and transformation.

Tanya Dawkins is an experienced analyst, executive and consultant in the areas of leadership, policy, organizational development and innovation for the common good.  Her work has helped a wide range of local, national and international partners and clients map their strategic priorities, understand and interpret increasingly interconnected global and local phenomena and manage emergent issues and opportunities. Tanya founded the Global‐Local Links Project to engage one of the most pressing issues of our time ‐-what it means to build citizen and community power in an age of intensifying globalization. She is completing a book titled Revolutionary Matters: How and Why Citizens are Becoming the Next Global Superpower.  Her writing has appeared in Hemisphere Magazine, Latin Trade, YES! Magazine, Publication de Analisis Politico y Economico Regional, In Focus and Perspectiva, among others.  She also serves on the board of YES! Magazine.

Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia and a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, covering topics ranging from globalization activism, Latin American social movements, and immigration to debt relief, trade, and liberation theology. He is author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). Mark writes a monthly column on American politics for the Oxford, UK-based New Internationalist magazine and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. His articles have been translated into more than 15 languages. An archive of his work is available at DemocracyUprising.com.

Peter Kalmus Peter Kalmus is a scientist studying clouds and climate change at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Caltech. (His views are his own.) Previously an astrophysicist with the LIGO collaboration, he holds a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He has reduced his fossil fuel use to well under a tenth of the U.S. average, and as a result he’s happier than ever. He enjoys keeping bees and chickens, growing food, and riding his bike. He believes climate scientists have a responsibility to speak out. His first book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, is forthcoming from New Society in July 2017.

Winona LaDuke writes extensively on native and environmental issues and is the author of Recovering the Sacred (2005), All Our Relations (1999), and Last Standing Woman (1997). She is the executive director of Honor the Earth and the founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. In 1998, Ms. Magazine named her “Woman of the Year,” and in 1994, she was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40 years of age. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations. She is the mother of three children.

Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of fifteen books including the 1971 3-million-copy bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet. With her daughter Anna Lappé, Frances leads the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education to bring democracy to life. In 1990, Lappé co-founded the Center for Living Democracy, a 10-year initiative to help accelerate the spread of democratic innovations. Lappé served as founding editor of the Center’s American News Service. Lappé has received 17 honorary doctorates from distinguished institutions. In 1987 in Sweden, Lappé became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel, for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity”.

Annie Leonard is the executive director of Greenpeace USA. In December 2007, Leonard released The Story of Stuff, a hit 20-minute video that takes viewers on a provocative and eye-opening tour of the often hidden costs of our consumer-driven culture. The film has generated over 13 million views in more than 200 countries and territories since its launch. She authored a book by the same name (published by Free Press in 2010).  She is also director of The Story of Stuff Project.

Penn Loh is Lecturer and Director of the Master in Public Policy Program and Community Practice at Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. He partners with various community base building organizations in the Right to the City Alliance and Center for Economic Democracy. He holds an M.S. in environmental science and policy from Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. He has published broadly on environmental and social justice issues.

Fran Korten was YES! executive director from April 1998 to March 2017. Before joining YES!, Fran served as a grantmaker for 20 years in the Ford Foundation’s offices in Manila, Jakarta, and New York, where she supported community-based approaches to the sustainable use of land, trees, and water. She has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University and taught at the national university of Ethiopia and at Harvard University. She lives with her husband, author David Korten, on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where she walks to work. She and David have two children and two grandchildren.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books on environmental topics, beginning with The End of Nature, which is often described as the first book on climate change for a general audience. The Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he is the founder of 350.org, a global grassroots campaign to combat climate change that organized what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”

Raj Patel is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked for the World Bank and the World Trade Organization—and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the U.S. House Financial Services Committee and was a food policy adviser to the United Nations. Patel is author of the critically acclaimed book Stuffed and Starved and the 2010 New York Times best seller The Value of Nothing. Currently, Patel is working on a documentary project about the global food system with award-winning director Steve James.

Madhu Suri Prakash is a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures and Escaping Education: Living as Learning Within Grassroots Cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of education from Syracuse University, as well as an M.B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from the University of Delhi. She has been widely recognized for her work on indigenous cultures, grassroots movements, cultural diversity, and environmental education.

Mark Trahant is an independent journalist and professor at the University of North Dakota. He’s a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and has written about American Indian and Alaska Native issues for more three decades. Trahant is the former editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and in that job began writing daily news poems on Twitter, a practice he has continued for nearly ten years. He is also a former Kaiser Family Foundation Fellow reporting about health care reform proposals that eventually became the Affordable Care Act. Trahant’s most recent blogging project, TrahantReports.com, covers the 2016 election focusing on American Indian and Alaska Native issues and candidates. Follow him on Twitter @NewsRimes4lines

Nathan Schneider, a writer, editor, and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has written about religion and resistance for publications including YES! Magazine, Harper’s, The Nation, the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is an editor of the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha and Waging Nonviolence, a daily source for people-powered news and analysis from around the world. He is the author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press in 2013.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned writer, activist, and commentator on the environment, feminism, and international issues. She won the 1993 Right Livelihood Award. She’s the author of numerous books, including Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (2008) and Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005). She holds a Ph.D. in particle physics and is the founder of Navdanya, an organization that promotes biodiversity and organic farming. The Guardian has called her “one of the world’s most prominent radical scientists.”

Jay Walljasper is a journalist who writes on issues such as sustainability, culture, and the commons. He is editor of OnTheCommons.org and author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons (2011), The Great Neighborhood Book (2007), and Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life (2001). He is also cities columnist for Shareable.net, an associate with the Citistates Group, and a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and Ode.