KAORI IZUMI:Born and raised in Japan, Kaori Izumi was smart, restless and ambitious. After university she left Japan to work worldwide for rural women’s rights. She spent a good deal of time in Africa working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and studied for her Masters degree. She is a published editor of The Land And Property Rights of Women And Orphans in the Context of HIV and AIDS: A Case Study in Zimbabwe. Soon after Kaori returned to settle in Japan, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of Fukushima drove her into community organizing. She founded Shut Tomari, a movement which successfully forced the shutdown of the Tomari nuclear power plant in Hokkaido, where she lives. Kaori has been organizing, petitioning and pursuing legal action on Fukushima since 2011. In 2013, Kaori Izumi died after a battle with cancer.
WINONA LADUKE: Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is an internationally acclaimed author, orator and activist. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities with advanced degrees in rural economic development, LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. LaDuke is founder and Co-Director of Honor the Earth, a national advocacy group encouraging public support and funding for native environmental groups. With Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on issues of climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development, food systems and environmental justice. In her own community in northern Minnesota, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country, and a leader on the issues of culturally-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, LaDuke also works to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering. She has been a tireless grassroots antinuclear activist in the Native American community for decades. Winona also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of a number of non-fiction titles including All Our Relations, The Winona LaDuke Reader, Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming, Food is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People and her latest, The Militarization of Indian Country. She has also penned a work of fiction, Last Standing Woman, and a children’s book, In the Sugarbush.
ALICE SLATER: Alice Slater is New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves as its UN NGO representative. She is a member of the Global Council of Abolition 2000, a network in 95 countries working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. She directs the network’s Sustainable Energy Working Group which produced a model statute for an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), launched in 2008 by Germany, Spain and Denmark, with 144 nations now participating. She is on the Board of the Lawyer’s Committee for Nuclear Policy and the Executive Committee of the Middle Powers Initiative, working to create pressure on nuclear weapons states for swifter nuclear disarmament. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the Rideau Institute. At the UN, Ms. Slater has organized numerous conferences, panels, and roundtables on security and environmental issues and has spoken frequently at meetings and conferences in the US and internationally. She has written numerous articles and op-eds, and has appeared frequently on local and national media. She serves on the Energy Committee of the New York City Bar Association and has also served on its Military Affairs Committee, the Committee on International Security Affairs and the UN Working Group.