Ted is always looking for ways to minimize his ecological footprint. Professionally, Ted is working to gain the skills necessary to turn his passion for sustainable development into action, as an entrepreneur or financing sustainable businesses.
Ted studied economics and international business at Saint Louis University’s campus in Madrid, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and was honored as the Distinguished Student in International Business for his class. As the founder and president of the SLU Madrid Business Club, Ted focused the club’s activities on sustainability.
While working for commercial real estate multi-national Jones Lang LaSalle’s Madrid office, Ted strove to implement sustainable practices both within the firm and for its clients. He proposed and designed an Environmental Sustainability Action Plan for JLL Spain. Green Building and Environmentally Sustainable Development remain a passion for Ted: he believes that the intersection of sustainable infrastructure and sustainable attitude is where we’ll find a sustainable society.
Ted currently works for a private equity firm in Madrid, learning skills that he hopes to apply to finance Environmentally Sustainable Development in the United States and around the world.
Tracy is the CEO and Founding Partner of Technical Green - a green industry career site focused on clean tech and green research and development.
Tracy's professional experience are in the recruitment advertising and non-profit sectors and she has for many years maintained a sustainable lifestyle.
Marie Oser is a best-selling author, columnist, and host/producer of VEG TV. A vegan lifestyle expert, and environmental advocate with a focus on nutrition and its role in disease prevention, Oser specializes in creating original gourmet recipes with a solid nutritional bottom line.
Many prominent medical and nutrition professionals endorse her work, including Dr. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University and principal researcher of the groundbreaking CHINA STUDY, and Neal Barnard, M.D. founder and president of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, DC.
Marie is president of VEGTV, Inc., a video production company producing content for TV and new media. VEGTV streams hundreds of lifestyle videos to more than 1,000 sites globally. In her role as Director of Product Development at Smart Planet Kitchen, she has created, Marie Oser’s Lean & Green, a new line of vegan and Fair Trade Certified products. Marie has appeared on CNN, ABC, National Public Radio, QVC, WUSA, WNBC, KCAL, KOVR, Home & Garden Television (HGTV), FINE LIVING, TECH TV, and Discovery Channel.
Vegetarian since 1971; vegan since 1990, Marie left a career in TV advertising to pursue her interest in food, health, and nutrition. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, she studied psychology at St. Joseph’s University. Marie is a gourmet cook and organic gardener living in California, writing her 5th book and hiking every day with Travis, her Yellow Lab companion.
Cherl Petso is the Associate Editor at Disaboom.com, an online magazine for people with disabilities. Her writing expertise includes articles about the environment and sustainable living, and vegan/vegetarian issues. A vegetarian for 16 years and a recent vegan, Cherl is passionate about animal rights and issues. She enjoys writing about simple ways to lessen the impact on the Earth.
Cherl recently moved to Denver, Colorado from Bellingham, Washington. She enjoys hiking and hanging out with her puppy.
Nathanial Manning works for the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) as a Regional Analyst for Asia. He focuses on two programs for CCI, the Green Building Retrofit program and the Waste Management program. Nathaniel recently graduated from Brown University as an Environmental Studies Masters student, specializing in sustainable design and international carbon policy. Nat also completed a Bachelor of Arts in World Religions at Brown, focusing on the philosophy of ethics and the intersection between religion and politics. He is completing his Masters thesis on clean-technology-transfer within the UN's carbon credit mechanism (the CDM), which allows developed countries to invest in carbon mitigating technologies in developing countries with the purpose of promoting sustainable development.
Nathaniel has a long history of involvement in environmental development work ranging from waste-to-energy entrepreneurial ventures to designing sustainable homes for the Guatemalan chapter of Habitat for Humanity, to working for a tidal energy engineering firm in Singapore. Nat's passion is in how intelligent innovative solutions and technologies can be applied to create a sustainable and free world. When Nat thinks of the word "green" he does not just think of the word "environment" but how we as humans can design systems and solutions that create win-win situations.
Robert Cowin is a political consultant for environmental NGOs. His nomadic childhood reveals a world-class carpetbagger, but he masks as a Texan-New Yorker hybrid. Formerly with the National Environmental Trust (now the Pew Environment Group) in DC, he’s spent time on Capital Hill advocating for Kyoto ratification, clean air, renewable energy technology, and green energy policy.
Robert has also worked on marine conservation issues, directing the Conserve Our Ocean Legacy coalition in the Mid-Atlantic States which successfully worked to help strengthen and reauthorize the Magnuson Steven’s Act. He now happily lives in Southern California, flying back east often as he finishes his Masters in International Relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
Dayanti Karunaratne is a freelance journalist based in Canada's capital city, Ottawa.
Since graduating from Carleton University's journalism program in 2006, Karunaratne has worked on the news desk at the Port Hope Evening Guide, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Molokai Times. Karunaratne's writing appears in the Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Magazine, the Globe and Mail, and other lifestyle publications.
Heather O'Neill is the founder of Eco to the People, a green living blog.
Before founding Eco to the People, Heather O’Neill wore so many hats in the field of journalism that even the Queen Mother would envy her collection. She has worked as the managing editor of a beauty trade magazine; as a copy editor for an online tech magazine; as the associate editor of a city magazine and as a newspaper reporter and columnist, and as the senior editor at the popular online newsletter ecofabulous.
Her work has appeared in many publications, including Parenting, Alternative Medicine, Natural Solutions, Marin Magazine, Greenwich Magazine and HOME.
Heather earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.
President-Elect Obama unveiled his economic team today, starting with naming a new Treasury Secretary. New York Federal Reserve Bank Chief, Tim Geithner will take over for Hank Paulson as the US Treasury Secretary, and this news couldn’t come a moment to soon for the US stock market which had been in a virtually freefall all last week
In Geithner, we have a brilliant economic mind, who’s an academic, not a Wall Street guy. He’s worked in the Treasury since the 80s and was also a Senior Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s known to be a pragmatist and he’s known to be assertive. Moreover, he represents change. A brilliant youthful mind who is ready to experiment with solutions to the financial crisis sounds like something the American public can get behind. He also enjoys the confidence of both the academic economic community and the business community. With Larry Summers as the head of the National Economic Council, he’ll be flanked by arguably the greatest economic mind in the country. Geithner is known as a tough regulator so it looks like he might be the right person to help fix some of the systemic problems on Wall Street. His academic background also makes him uniquely suited to think creatively about solutions to our current crisis. This appears to be a good move by President-Elect Obama.
I’m not an economist, but I recently completed a course in international finance and I’ve come to learn one thing about how the economy works. Much of it is psychological. The market itself is merely the manifestation of the relationship between how we collectively feel about our situation and how we express that as consumers. Indeed deficits and bad business practices which erase wealth are real, but how we react to that information is where the real damage occurs. Things that instill confidence in the average American serve to strengthen the economy. That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but it seems to make sense to me.
Nothing instills confidence like having a job, and President-Elect Obama has announced he wants to create 2.5 million jobs by 2010. Now that could just be rhetoric, but today, we found out that Summers and Geithner are the ones responsible for figuring out how to make that happen. Indeed, this appears to be the beginning of a serious plan to jumpstart our economy and restore confidence to our financial system, and Americans can feel confident in the abilities of these two men.
This looms large in the face of President Bush’s irrelevance on the economy. It appears he’s checked out a few months early.
I think Geithner was a wise choice. I’m glad to see Obama wasted very little time making this appointment. Thanks for your posts, I enjoy reading them.
Meredith
November 26, 2008 5pm EST
I’m just glad to see that it wasn’t another CEO of one of the banks that helped contribute to the problem. We need a more objective voice running the Treasury. Geithner’s regulatory views are probably what the system needs right now.
Brad
November 26, 2008 5pm EST
It seems like Obama is just grabbing every great economic mind he can - He’s appointed Sumners and Volcker to head up various councils and boards. I hope all these guys work together well!!
BJohnson42
November 26, 2008 7pm EST
Does anyone know if Obama outlined where those 2.5 million jobs are going to come from?
Karen
November 26, 2008 10pm EST
So great to see that Obama is actually living up to his campaign promises. It’s hard to imagine the US pulling out of this economic turmoil any time soon, but if it’s going to happen it’s going to be those academics who have studied the situation over the past few decades and have solutions they that are tested…not those who have just shared in the profits.
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I think Geithner was a wise choice. I’m glad to see Obama wasted very little time making this appointment. Thanks for your posts, I enjoy reading them.
I’m just glad to see that it wasn’t another CEO of one of the banks that helped contribute to the problem. We need a more objective voice running the Treasury. Geithner’s regulatory views are probably what the system needs right now.
It seems like Obama is just grabbing every great economic mind he can - He’s appointed Sumners and Volcker to head up various councils and boards. I hope all these guys work together well!!
Does anyone know if Obama outlined where those 2.5 million jobs are going to come from?
So great to see that Obama is actually living up to his campaign promises. It’s hard to imagine the US pulling out of this economic turmoil any time soon, but if it’s going to happen it’s going to be those academics who have studied the situation over the past few decades and have solutions they that are tested…not those who have just shared in the profits.