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Williams Holmberg is the Chairman and President of Renew the Earth and the Chairman of the Board at the New Uses Council and the Biomass Coordinating Council of the American Council on Renewable Energy. Holmberg has worked for the EPA where he helped pioneer the use of ethanol as fuel, integrated the registration of biological pesticides, and fostered organic farming programs. He also helped establish the Office of Alcohol Fuels at the Department of Energy. Holmberg is a US Naval Academy graduate and has served in the Marine Corps. He has been awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, the Joint Service Commendation Medal and the EPA Silver Medal. Holmberg has advanced degrees in Personnel Administration, Russian Language, Soviet Affairs, and in Amphibious and Integrated Combat Operations.

Darryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was awarded The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1992 for his novel High Cotton.

Patricia Powell is the 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor of Writing at MIT. She is the author of three novels, Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones and The Pagoda. Powell was born in Jamaica, grew up in England and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1982. She often weaves gender, race and sexuality into her work.

*7 NEWS* General Assignment Reporter Mike Macklin reports for *7 NEWS* and has covered a wide range of major stories of both local and national interest. Macklin's reporting for *7 NEWS* and his correspondence for the NBC NewsChannel have taken him all over the country. Before coming to *7 NEWS* in 1994, Macklin worked for more than 10 years as a reporter-anchor at WBZ-TV and WBZ-AM in Boston. At WBZ-TV, Macklin was responsible for political reporting, covering local, state and national elections, presidential primaries and party nominating events. He also was a general assignment reporter, as well as the anchor for Sunday mid-day newscast. Macklin has been nominated for a New England Emmy award for individual achievement in news reporting.

David Beard has been a reporter and editor for the past 27 years. He worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and was deputy foreign editor, regional editor, and assistant managing editor for The Boston Globe. He has been the editor of Boston.com, one of the nation's biggest newspaper-based web sites, since September 2006. Beard also teaches news writing at the Harvard Extension School and is on the board of the school's journalism masters program. He was an Inter American Press Association scholar in Argentina and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Billy Bean was born in Santa Ana, California in 1964 and graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 1986 with a degree in Business Administration. He played major league baseball from 1987 through 1995, breaking into the major leagues with the Detroit Tigers. Bean tied a major league record with 4 hits in his first major league game. He went on to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the San Diego Padres. Billy came out publicly in 1999 on the front page of The New York Times, and subsequently on a nationally televised story with Diane Sawyer. He is the only living former major league baseball player to acknowledge his homosexuality. Bean is the author of, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a life in and out of Major League Baseball. (Avalon Publishing Group, NYC.)

Jean E. Jackson received her B.A. from Wellesley College in Sociology/Anthropology in 1965, and her M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1972) from Stanford University. She began teaching at MIT in the fall of 1972. Her earlier Latin American research interests included small-scale societies, kinship and marriage, gender, and anthropological linguistics. During the past 20 years she has examined indigenous mobilizing in Colombia. She is currently conducting archival research on how Colombia's indigenous communities have been represented in the two national newspapers, 1988-present. She is the author of several books and essays including: *The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia* which was published in 1983. In 2002 she and co-editor Kay B. Warren published *Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America*. Recent essays include "Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: Controversies, ironies, new directions" co-authored with Kay B. Warren (2005 Annual Review of Anthropology). She has also published various pieces on the Colombian conflict. "Colombia's Indigenous Peoples Confront the Armed Conflict" came out in 2005, as well as "Update on the Colombian Crisis" for the American Anthropological Association Committee for Human Rights.

Christopher Capozzola specializes in the political and cultural history of the United States from 1861 to 1945. He graduated from Harvard College and competed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. He has held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carnegie Scholars Program, and the Social Science Research Council. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, cultural history, and the history of race, gender, and class.

Jeffrey Ravel studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid 17th through the mid 19th centuries. He is the author of The Would Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France in 2008, and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 in 1999. He was Editor for volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, an annual publication of the American Society for 18th Century Studies.