Afternoon Symposium

The Way Forward:

 Cooperation and Collaboration in the Age of Climate Shift

The Afternoon Symposium is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to help us plan for adequate seating.  Click here to RSVP for the Afternoon Symposium

In a panel format, speakers from several groups with diverse points of view on energy and climate will offer their views on imaginative, long-term thinking ways for organizations to interface and to work together on the overarching environmental issue of our times. Following the panel presentation (about an hour), the floor will be open for interaction between audience and panel members. Creative, innovative, out-of-the-box ideas for interactions among groups -- including heretofore unseen combinations of groups with different foci -- are strongly encouraged.

The aim of our 30th Anniversary Gala and Symposium is both to celebrate 30 years of accomplishments and to create progressive dialogue around the challenges we face as a society; and, from this platform, to launch the next 30 years -- during which society must address these formidable problems. To achieve our aim, we will join in partnership with a diversity of organizations to share the work of creating synergistic solutions to severe energy, climate, security, natural resource, economic and social problems, and to work for a better and more sustainable world.

Speakers include:

Eric Utne was founder of the New Age Journal and the Utne Reader. He has a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Minnesota, is President of the Board of Trustees of Sunbridge College, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the U of M. In 2006 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum.






Michael Noble Executive director of Fresh Energy since 1995, Noble is known for building constituencies and developing policies for a new energy paradigm and has been a strategist for major public policy innovations. Michael graduated from Carleton College with a BA in History, is chair of the Clean Energy Working Group and serves on the board of directors of Conservation Minnesota Voter Center, Wind on the Wires, and the Will Steger Foundation.



John Carmody Director of the Center for Sustainable Building Research at the University of Minnesota, John holds a Masters in Architecture and has worked in building-related research for 30 years. Mr. Carmody helped developed the State of Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines required on State-funded buildings. 






Rep. Melissa Hortman Rep. Melissa Hortman is currently in her third term in the Minnesota House, where she serves as Assistant Majority Leader and sits on five committees dealing with environment, energy, transportation, finance, and rules issues. She was the principal House author of both the 2008 and 2009 versions of the Minnesota Clean Cars bill, which proposed instituting statewide automobile pollution standards paralleling those in California and now largely in place nationwide through the efforts of the Obama administration; in that effort, she worked closely with the Clean Energy Minnesota coalition of more than a dozen environmental groups


Duane Ninneman founder Sage Research and Consulting (SRC) Duane specializes in clean energy development and facilitating community partnerships. Ninneman advocates for an energy agenda that supports rural communities, often advising state legislators and national leaders and staffs the Clean Energy Desk for Clean Up the River Environment (CURE).





Siri Simons is currently in her second year of the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is one of the core group members of the student group, "Students Beyond Coal," a group of students striving for a coal-free campus. In her free time, she enjoys running, backpacking, and dancing.

Moderator: Christopher Childs Actor, environmental activist and author of The Spirit’s Terrain: Creativity, Activism, and Transformation, with foreword by the Dalai Lama; Publisher’s Weekly called the book a “spiritual manifesto for modern-day social-environ- mental activists,” and Bill Moyers praised it as “a very powerful insight that has significance for journalism as well as activism.” Childs has served with Greenpeace and on the boards of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter and MRES. More about Childs on the World Garden.


Please RSVP for the Afternoon Symposium

The Afternoon Symposium is free and open to the public. Please RSVP ASAP to help us plan for adequate seating.

Friday, February 19, 2010
Governors Hall
at Crowne Plaza Hotel, St. Paul, MN
Symposium from 2:00 to 4:00 pm

View the afternoon and evening gala schedule