Ross Gelbspan is a retired editor and reporter with The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. At the Globe he conceived, directed and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. In 1998, he published "The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-Up, The Prescription" (Perseus Books). The book received a good deal of attention when President Clinton told the press he was reading it. That year, Gelbspan and Dr. Paul Epstein convened a group of energy company presidents, economists and energy policy experts to refine a set of three interactive "macro-level" policy strategies to address the climate crisis.

Those ideas formed the core of Gelbspan's latest book, "Boiling Point," which was published in 2004. The book received the lead review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, which was written by former Vice President Al Gore. It was also honored as one of the best science books of 2004 by Discover Magazine. The "strategy solutions" spelled out in "Boiling Point" have been endorsed by a number of developing country NGOs. They were the subject of a briefing to the management of Shell/EGYPT in Cairo. They were the subject of a short presentation at the World Bank at the invitation of the director of a G-8 Task Force on Renewable Energy. They have been endorsed by, among others, a former British Ambassador to the UN and the Environmental Commissioner of the European Union. Gelbspan's website, www.heatisonline.org, was cited as one of the best climate change websites by the Pacific Institute.

Gelbspan, a 31-year journalist, received his B.A. from Kenyon College and studied international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is married to Anne Gelbspan, a non-profit developer of affordable housing.His oldest daughter, Thea, was a Latin America  program officer for Oxfam for six years. She is currently pursuing an advanced degree at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His younger daughter, Johanna, is now CFO of The American Prospect Magazine.

Ted Glick has devoted 39 years of his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973 he co-founded the National Committee to
Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August, 1974 resignation.

For the last three years Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a clean energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the
Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December 3rd actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in
Montreal. He was on the core committee for the April 29th, 2006  March for Peace, Justice and Democracy in NYC which included the climate crisis as one of its major issues. In May, 2006 he became the national coordinator of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council.

Between the mid-70's and 2005, Ted was actively involved in community organizing efforts around environmental, tenant rights, community development and racial justice issues in Brooklyn, N.Y. and northern New Jersey.  On a national scale he has been a leader in coalition-building and independent politics efforts.  From 1995 to 2005, he was the National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network.

He has participated in and led hundreds of actions. He has been arrested eleven times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, including on October 23rd, 2006 in the Washington, D.C. area protesting government inaction on global heating.

As the national coordinator of the People's Alliance, he helped to organize the 1980 People's Convention of several thousand people on the devastated Charlotte St. area in the South Bronx and a march of 15,000 people to Madison Square Garden just before the Democratic Convention. In 2002 he was a primary organizer of the April 20th, 80,000-person march in Washington, D.C. against the militaristic and repressive response of the Bush administration to 9/11. Also in 2002, he was a Green Party of New Jersey candidate for U.S. Senate.  Over the years, Ted's commitment to social justice has led him to partake in 17 extended fasts, 3 of which were for more than a month.

His prolific writing on the movement to which he devotes his life includes his 2000 book, Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society, and his column, "Future Hope," which has been distributed nationally over seven years.

Connie Hogarth rallies influential friends to support left-wing issues. Her latest cause: shuttering a local nuclear plant.
On Connie Hogarth’s expansive lawn along the Hudson River, dozens of activists gather one sunny May afternoon, raising $1,500 for a group defying the U.S. trade blockade by sending humanitarian aid to Cuba. Wearing Birkenstock sandals, faded blue jeans, and a T-shirt that declares “Democracy Now,” Hogarth, PhB’47, SB’48, rails against what she sees as wrongheaded American foreign policy. Then the 79-year-old lauds a handful of war protestors who’d been at a rally at West Point Military Academy, across the Hudson, where President Bush had just delivered the commencement address. “At least 300 people made it there, and I think our message got through,” Hogarth, of Beacon, New York, tells the crowd. “We need to find every opportunity to voice our opposition.”

Hogarth has been doing just that for more than 40 years. A leader on the political left in New York City’s northern suburbs, she has worked to ban the bomb, end racial segregation, stop the Vietnam War, abolish the death penalty, shut down nuclear power, impeach President Nixon, free Nelson Mandela, elect Jesse Jackson, X’67, disarm the Central American death squads, and form a Palestinian state.

In 23 years as executive director of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC), Hogarth took on a bevy of causes before “retiring” in 1996. This spring she served on the national Climate Crisis Coalition’s steering committee, which helped gather 40,000 petition signatures urging U.S. ratification of the Kyoto global-warming accords. She planned the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter’s annual dinner and spent a day making whipped cream for shortcake at a local environmental group’s strawberry festival. To find the most politically viable candidate to oppose six-term GOP Representative Sue W. Kelly, she helped plan forums for six candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for New York’s 19th District. The week before her lawn benefit, she organized a town-hall meeting calling for President Bush’s impeachment, with former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat, laying out the case to a standing-room only audience in Beacon.

On Saturdays she often picks up her neighbor, legendary folksinger Pete Seeger, to meet a gaggle of protestors at a busy suburban intersection, where they urge motorists to honk if they oppose the war. “At the beginning of the war, there were lots of thumbs down,” she says. “It has changed palpably in the past six months. The cacophony of sound from all that honking is an energizing experience.”

Hogarth is also teaching the next generation of activists how to make waves. At Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, she runs the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action, begun in 1997 by two professors who’d worked with her on special programs at the college while she led WESPAC. They named the center in her honor and called on her to pitch in. She meets weekly with undergraduates training for social-justice advocacy careers, while designing events that draw national figures like leftist historian Howard Zinn and actress Ruby Dee. Hogarth is like a proud grandmother at the lawn benefit when she announces that one of her students has landed a job with Pastors for Peace, the group sending aid to Cuba.

“Connie’s an indefatigable organizer,” says Seeger, 87, who came to the afternoon event. “If it doesn’t work in one way, she’ll organize it in another way. Connie’s happiest out there with people in the struggle.”
Her links within the American left run deep, and it is those connections and a healthy work ethic that make her such a powerhouse. A 1999 dinner program honoring her activism included written tributes from liberal icons Jesse Jackson, actor Ossie Davis, writer Grace Paley, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who called her “an American Joan of Arc, a mighty moral force.”

The local ACLU chapter holds an annual event memorializing Henry Schwarzchild, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, and Hogarth has booked the event’s speaker each year. In 2002 she decided to pursue Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking (book 1994, film 1995). But Prejean is in great demand, and her time has been tight as she works on another book about the death penalty. This fall Prejean finally will address the event. “I am very persistent,” says Hogarth. “It took me four years of making the phone calls and sending e-mails, and then doing it again and again. That’s what it takes sometimes.”

Journalist Ross Gelbspan, who serves on the Climate Crisis Coalition steering committee with Hogarth, says he is impressed by her environmental-movement connections, her commitment, and her ability to catalyze a group. She has helped broaden the coalition’s reach, Gelbspan says, by linking with activists in poor neighborhoods where extreme weather conditions exacerbate respiratory illnesses. “When our group comes up with an issue for which no one has a solution,” he says, “Connie invariably comes up with suggestions that make things work.”

Raised in Brooklyn, Hogarth walked her first picket line as a child with her father, a movie projectionist and union organizer. After three semesters at New York City’s Hunter College, she won a scholarship to Chicago, where she was pre-med and also began her years-long studies of modern dance.

Politics became part of Hogarth’s (then Holubar) college education too. Just a few years after Hiroshima was laid to waste by the first atomic bomb, she hung out with liberal classmates and engaged in spirited discussions about the blast’s destructive power. She moved back to New York following graduation and, after failing to win admittance to medical school at a time when few women were accepted, she became a medical researcher.

She worked under Jacob Auslander, who, as a member of the McCarthy-era Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, was sentenced to three months in jail and a $500 fine. One of his patients was Ring Lardner Jr., one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went on trial for espionage, she traveled to Washington, DC, for her first Capitol protest. “I was immersed in the political life of the times,” says Hogarth. “It was a revelatory and rich experience.”

In 1953 she married cartoonist Burne Hogarth, who drew the Tarzan comic strip (1937–50) and founded the art school that became New York’s School for the Visual Arts. Soon after son Richard was born in 1956 and son Ross in 1959, the Hogarths moved to suburban Westchester County, which had a reputation for good public schools. (She and Burne divorced in 1981, and nine years ago she married Art Kamell, a longtime activist and former labor lawyer.)

Hogarth’s activism deepened after moving to Westchester, as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew and the antiwar movement gained traction. She was active on both the local and national level, working for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom while also helping to found Northern Westchester People for Peace. In 1973 she helped start WESPAC, whose membership peaked at 5,000 in the early 1980s.

Hogarth also put her body on the line in civil disobedience. Her first of some 20 arrests came in 1968 outside the White House, where she and 30 other protestors staged a “die-in,” lying down at the gates to symbolize how many people died in Vietnam that day. Four months after the 1979 near-catastrophe at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, she led one of Westchester County’s biggest protests ever, as more than 4,000 people marched on the Indian Point nuclear complex on the Hudson River, 17 miles south of her home.

After 9/11, Hogarth renewed her interest in Indian Point activism. One of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center flew a route almost directly over Indian Point. Suddenly suburbanites who had come to accept the risks of nuclear power feared that the plant, only 40 miles north of New York City, could become a terrorist target. Although politicians had long since written off the antinuclear movement, they now responded to their constituents; many called for the complex’s shutdown. While the elected officials have yet to succeed, the political dynamic has shifted. A 2006 federal study detailed how the plant could be transformed to natural gas as an alternative, yet costlier, source of regional electric power.

For Hogarth, the changing attitudes reflect a political maxim that continues to fuel her passion as she approaches her 80th birthday in November: “When the people lead,” she repeats, “eventually the leaders will follow.”

Reverend Paul Mayer was a Benedictine monk for 18 years. While in the monastery he was ordained a priest. He later served the community at San Miguelito in Panama. When he returned to the US he became Executive Director of an interfaith coalition working for justice and peace. He was the co-founder of "Children of War," an award winning youth leadership organization, which worked with teenage youth from international and domestic war zones. He continues to be involved with projects for peace and the environment. Paul is affiliated with the Federation of Christian Ministries and is a dedicated yoga practitioner.

Ibrahim Ramey, Human and Civil Rights Director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, is a tenth-generation indigenous American Muslim of African ancestry.  Ramey, who previously served as the non-nuclear proliferation chief of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of America’s oldest peace organizations, has been a tireless champion for global peace and reconciliation.

He holds UN credentials, and has been a U.S. representative and presenter at countless conferences on global peace, nuclear proliferation and international conflict resolution.  Ramey is also one of the founding members of Muslim Peace Fellowship.  In June 2005, Ramey was a part of MAS Freedom’s Abrahamic peace delegation to Darfur, Sudan.

Under Ramey's leadership the MAS Freedom Human and Civil Rights Division, which will monitor Human and Civil Rights violations and advocate pro-active measures in addressing these issues, will also work towards strengthening coalition ties with existing human and civil rights organizations in addition to conducting educational and advocacy campaigns that lend itself to grassroots, legal and legislative initiatives.

While focusing domestically on U.S. policies that impact human and civil rights, the new division will also focus on global conflict resolution, with special emphasis on the Middle East and Africa.

MAS Freedom Foundation Executive Director, Mahdi Bray, stated, "Truly, it is a blessing to have a person of Ibrahim’s experience as part of MAS Freedom.  Having him as the driving force in our Human and Civil Rights Department will allow us to work more pro-actively around such important issues as racial and religious profiling, constitutional rights, immigration rights, torture rendition, civil liberties, human rights violations, arms export and proliferation and conflict resolution.

Tom Stokes has been the coordinator for the Climate Crisis Coalition (CCC) since July 2004.  He also edits the CCC Daily Newsfeed, an email news summary, which goes to subscribers wishing to keep up to date with climate-related news. His career has largely involved the environmental movement and local and regional governance.  In 1969 he founded Environment!- a youth oriented group, engaging people through street actions and building temporary parks on vacant lots.  In the mid 1970’s Tom worked for Friends of the Earth in their New York office.  In the 1990’s he was the Massachusetts director of the Housatonic Valley Association (a Mass/Conn watershed group) and served as a selectman in Stockbridge, and as a Berkshire County Commissioner.  Over the years he has also been a house painter, dock builder, ranch worker and a merchant seaman. His commitment to global warming issues is based on a longstanding desire to address the interplay between environmental, social and economic equity.

Judith Thompson, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in peace studies at The Union Institute. For over twenty years, she has been engaged in projects promoting social healing, working primarily with survivors of war and political violence. In 1984, Judith co-founded Children of War, Inc., an organization that supported the vision and leadership of young activists from 22 war-torn countries. Judith has also helped to develop programs in Israel/Palestine and Cambodia and has worked closely with indigenous elders from North, Central, and South America who seek to support worldwide social and ecological healing through traditional ceremonies. She is board member of the Center for Psychology and Social Change affiliated with Cambridge Hospital, co-chairs the Spirit and Human Rights initiative funded by the Fetzer Institute, and is on the Advisory Board of One by One, Inc. In 1993, she was recipient of both the Bunting Peace Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and the International Peace Prize of the Dolores Kohl Education Foundation. She is currently co-producing a film entitled "From Victims to Visionaries" about those victims of violence who chose not to take revenge and what motivates that choice.