Left Forum 2013: What Can Environmentalists Do? Pt. 2

The conclusion of this panel discussion features Alyssa Battistoni, Mark Engler, Charles Callaway, and Andrew Ross, with Nick Serpe moderating.

About the panelists:

Alyssa Battistoni is a former editorial intern and continuing music contributor for Mother Jones. She also has written about politics and environment for Salon, AlterNet, Campus Progress, the Huffington Post, and TheNation.com.

Mark Engler is a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia and a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, a network of foreign policy experts. He is author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books), selected by the Drum Major Institute as one of the “most interesting and informative progressive books” of 2008. An archive of his work is available at DemocracyUprising.com.

Mark is a monthly columnist for the Oxford, UK-based New Internationalist magazine. He serves on the editorial board of Dissent and writes a weekly post for the magazine’s “Arguing the World” blog. His articles on the global economy, social movements, Latin American affairs, militarism, domestic politics, and the environment appear in publications including The Progressive, The Nation, Newsday, Audubon, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, The Ecologist, In These Times, Grist Magazine, and TomDispatch. His work has also been featured in anthologies including Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009.

Mark’s articles have been translated into more than 15 languages, are distributed in Spanish by Miami’s Progreso Semanal, and are regularly published abroad. He is a member of the Authors Guild.

Originally from Des Moines, Iowa, Mark graduated from Harvard University in 1998, where he studied ethics in the modern West, with a focus on human rights theory and liberation theology. He subsequently worked for the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, where he served as a speechwriter and assistant to Dr. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and the 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate. Mark has also lived in or reported from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, and other parts of Latin America.

Mark is an experienced public speaker and has been a guest on BBC World News, National Public Radio, Air America, and dozens of Pacifica, commercial talk radio, and independent radio stations, addressing issues ranging from economic crises, “free trade,” and debt relief to U.S. military actions, popular protests, and elections throughout the Americas. He has served as a commentator for the Institute for Public Accuracy and for the Mainstream Media Project.

After residing in New York City for nearly a decade, Mark relocated to Philadelphia in 2010.

Charles Callaway is a life-long resident of West Harlem. In his position as Community Organizer and Outreach Coordinator at WE ACT, Charles taps into many years of working with local youth in leadership and empowerment programs throughout Harlem. Charles has played a key role in organizing residents around significant issues in the Harlem community. He worked with Harlem residents on the Columbia University expansion and 125th Street Rezoning by developing their capacity to advocate for their own communities during City Council hearings on these projects. More recently, Charles has been working with the Mother Clara Hale Community Taskforce and the MTA to build the first green bus depot in Harlem. He successfully organized almost 200 community residents to participate in a community charrette concerning the development of the bus depot in 2008. Two years later, Charles continued to be WE ACT’s lead organizer on this project, facilitating the participation of residents in community and town hall meetings to plan and dialogue with the MTA. As part of his work with WE ACT in Harlem, Charles has helped the community understand the importance of advocating on its own behalf. He is has taken a stand alongside the community to make sure that we all can live in a healthy environment.

Andrew Ross (born 1956) is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A writer for The New York Times, Artforum, The Nation, Newsweek and The Village Voice, he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth, has an activist, alternative globalization approach, and emphasizes principles of sustainability.

Nick Serpe is an editorial assistant at Dissent Magazine.

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