Megan (last name pronounced sEYE-bert!) is a systems thinker who started REALgnd in response to the overwhelmingly short-sighted rhetoric about energy and sustainability, filling a need for sober analysis and bold truth-telling.

 

Raised in Michigan and now residing in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, Megan’s gypsy life has been defined by the transformative tension of opposites. She was raised in a conservative military family yet was deeply influenced by her environmentally oriented relatives and scholarly German heritage. She’s worked in the defense sector and has also done conventional environmental work along with horse packing in the wildernesses of Montana and Wyoming. She has an M.S. in Systems Science/Environmental Management from Portland State University and an international studies B.S. with core STEM from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

 

A regular yoga practice that began out of college, later catalyzed by exposure to Eastern philosophies in graduate school, led her into the world of shamanism, animism, astrology, channeling, and teacher plants. After a decade-long journey of truth seeking that culminated in a spiritual awakening, she’s stepped into an entirely new way of being, having come to see this as a profound period of revelation, choice-making, and metamorphosis. Equal parts romantic, irreverent, and principled, Megan is a Myers-Briggs INFJ and a Sag sun/Libra moon/Cancer rising who's deeply fulfilled by this work to help awaken and empower humanity.

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Contact at megan.seibert(at)realgnd.org.

William is a human ecologist, ecological economist, and Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning in Vancouver, Canada, where his research and teaching focused on the biophysical prerequisites for sustainability in an era of accelerating ecological change. He has a special interest in ecologically relevant metrics of sustainability and their interpretation in terms of complexity theory and behavioral ecology.

 

William is perhaps best known as the originator and co-developer of the ecological footprint analysis. Widely adopted for sustainability assessments by governments, NGOs, and academics, it has arguably become world’s best-known sustainability indicator.

 

He has authored or co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He has also authored numerous popular articles on humanity’s unsustainability conundrum, focusing on cognitive and cultural barriers to sustainability.

 

William is a long-term member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group, a Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, a founding member and past President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative. He has lectured by invitation throughout North America and 25 other countries around the world. In 2006, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and in 2007 he was awarded a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. He is the recipient of the 2012 Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics and a 2012 Blue Planet Prize, jointly with Dr.  Mathis Wackernagel.

David, MA, PGCE, FRSA, is a writer, lecturer, poet, and editor. He is a founder of Character Education Scotland, Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network, and former President of Wrekin Trust and the Swedenborg Society. He has been the editor of Paradigm Explorer since 1986, was the instigator of the Beyond the Brain conference series in 1995, and has co-ordinated the Mystics and Scientists conferences every year since the late 1980s. His is Chair of the Galileo Commission, which seeks to the expand the evidence base of the science of consciousness beyond a materialistic world view, and is a Creative Member of the Club of Budapest.

 

Originally a merchant banker then a teacher of philosophy and modern languages at Winchester College, he is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Survival? Death as Transition (1984, 2017), Resonant Mind (originally Whole in One) (1990/2017), The Spirit of Science (1998), Thinking Beyond the Brain (2001), The Protein Crunch (with Jason Drew), and A New Renaissance (edited with Oliver Robinson). He has edited three books about the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov): Prophet for our Times (1991, 2015), The Circle of Sacred Dance, and Gems of Love, which is a translation of his prayers and formulas into English. His book on the ideas and work of the Prince of Wales – Radical Prince (2003) – has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, and French. His new book of essays, A Quest for Wisdom, was published in 2021.

 

In 2020, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Visionary Leader by the Visioneers International Network, and in 2021 he received the Aboca Human Ecology Prize. His website is www.davidlorimer.co.uk.

Harald is a clinical psychologist, philosopher of science, and researcher at the interface between medicine, psychology, and consciousness studies. He is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at Next Society Institute with Kazimieras Simonavicius University in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is the Founder and Director of the Change Health Science Institute in Basel, Switzerland, where he lives as a freelance scientist and author. Until June 2021, he was a professor at the Medical University of Poznan and a Visiting Professor at Witten/Herdecke University. Until 2016, he was a Professor of Research Methodology at the European University Viadrina.

 

Harald has a 30-year career evaluating complementary medicine practices. His recent work focuses on the role of spirituality and consciousness within science, our health system, and our culture at large. He’s published more than 205 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, written 113 chapters for books, written 16 books himself, and edited 16. He ranks in the upper third of the Ioannidis Citation Database of the 100,000 most highly cited scientists worldwide, placing him in the 5 per thousand most cited scientists.

 

Since university, he has been preoccupied with what exactly “healing” is and what the relationship is between external empiricism, i.e., scientific experience, and internal experience, i.e., personal, individual experience. The question of healing led him relatively quickly to homeopathy and later to complementary medicine, where healing is primarily understood as self-healing. He is looking at whether it is possible to achieve prevention of dementia through lifestyle change, investigating the value of mindfulness and interventions based on it. He has long wondered whether it is conceivable and meaningful to develop a theory of wholeness in which non-local processes have a systematic theoretical place. Indeed, work on a generalisation of quantum theory takes place within this context. His website is https://harald-walach.info.