Past Speakers

Seth Godin

Godin is the author of 21 bestsellers, the creator of one of the most popular blogs in the world, and a lifelong entrepreneur and teacher. In 2021, he helped lead 300 other volunteers in 40 countries to create The Carbon Almanac, a bestselling, award-winning book about what's really happening to our climate.

Douglas Tallamy 

Douglas Tallamy is a renowned American entomologist, conservationist, and University of Delaware professor known for championing native plants to combat biodiversity loss, advocating for homeowners to create habitat through landscaping, and co-founding the Homegrown National Park initiative; his influential books, like Bringing Nature Home and Nature's Best Hope, connect everyday gardening to ecological restoration, making him a leading voice in sustainable landscaping.

Tracy Brown

Tracy Brown became President and Hudson Riverkeeper at the environmental protection NGO 'Riverkeeper' in 2021. A recognized leader in clean water advocacy, she was instrumental in developing water quality monitoring programs at both Riverkeeper and Save the Sound, and she was an architect of New York's Sewage Pollution Right to Know Law.

Eugene Linden

Eugene Linden writes about the environment, nature, animal behavior, finance and social issues. He has been writing about climate change since 1988, in articles, essays and op-eds, for Time, The New York Times, and many other publications. His previous book on climate, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, was awarded the Grantham Prize Special Award of Merit. He has published ten other books, which have appeared in 13 foreign language editions.

Douglas Rushkoff

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He serves as a  research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.

Cynthia Scharf

Cynthia Scharf is a Senior Fellow for Climate Interventions at the Centre for Future Generations where she is advancing discussions with policymakers on the need for international governance of solar geoengineering technologies. She can speak to a range of issues related to this, including ethics and intergenerational justice, and geopolitical implications.

She was previously the senior strategy director for the Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative (2017-2023), with responsibilities for policy (security implications of solar geoengineering; geoengineering and the Arctic) outreach, and communications.

Prior to C2G, Scharf served for eight years at the United Nations as the head of strategic climate communications and speechwriter for former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (2009-2016). As a senior member of the Secretary-General’s climate change team, she advised and supported the Secretary-General during the UN climate negotiations, including during the landmark Paris climate change agreement in 2015.

Cynthia received her M.A. from Georgetown and is on the advisory board of Climate Interactive and SRM360. She was a fellow at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and served on the board of GreenFaith, a multi-faith climate advocacy organisation.

Amy Ziff 

Amy is a healthy living educator with a genetic predisposition to toxicity. She’s also mom to three young kids who share the same trait. Determined to make the world less toxic, Amy reached millions of parents and caregivers with her “buy better” advocacy campaigns. She blogs about the chemical world we live in on Amy Ziff’s NoTox Life, and prior to founding MADE SAFE, taught classes on living a nontoxic life and co-founded the Veritey Shop, a site comprised of safe, nontoxic products. Amy is changing the world for the healthier one product at a time, one person at a time, one home at a time.

Cynthia Rosenzweig

Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she heads the Climate Impacts Group. She is Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), a body of experts convened by the mayor to advise the city on adaptation for its critical infrastructure. She co-led the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She was a Coordinating Lead Author of Working Group II for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is Co-Director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), Co-Editor of the First and Second UCCRN Assessment Reports on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3), and Co-Chair of the Urban Thematic Group for the United Nations UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Campaign for an Urban Sustainability Development Goal (SDG). She serves as Chair of the Board of the New York City Climate Museum. She was named as one of “Nature’s 10: Ten People Who Mattered in 2012” by the journal Nature, for her work preparing New York City for climate extremes and change. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she joins impact models with climate models to project future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions. She is a Professor at Barnard College and a Senior Research Scientist at The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Amy Larkin

Amy Larkin, an award-winning environmental activist and entrepreneur, co-founded and leads PR3, a global initiative creating the tools to scale reusable packaging. PR3 is now accrediting the first global standards for reuse and with partners is implementing aligned reuse systems in eight countries. Previously, as Solutions Director of Greenpeace, Amy led the Consumer Goods Forum, 400 multinationals, to commit to eliminating HFCs from all new equipment. This led to the inclusion of HFCs into the Montreal Protocol in 2016, and is anticipated to save .5C degrees of global warming.

In her 2013 book, Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy, Amy exposes the link between our financial and environmental crises. She wrote regularly for The Guardian between 2013-2015, was Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Climate Change from 2014-2016, and has been speaking about Climate Change and its relationship to Money, Immigration, and Culture for decades at every kind of large and small venue. 

John Nolon

Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus. Co-Counsel, Land Use Law Center, Pace University. Tarrytown resident. Supervises student research and publications regarding land use, sustainable development, climate change, housing insecurity, racial inequity, and the coronavirus pandemic. He is Co-counsel to the Law School's Land Use Law Center, which he founded in 1993. He served as Adjunct Professor of land use law and policy at the Yale School of the Environment from 2001-2016. Before he joined the law school faculty, he founded and directed the Housing Action Counsel to foster the development of affordable housing.

Jennie Romer

Jennie is the founder of PlasticBagLaws.org, led the Surfrider Foundation’s Plastic Policy and is now the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pollution Prevention at US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She has written an adult and children's book about recycling. 

Neil Maher

Historian Neil Maher will discuss President Biden’s American Climate Corps (ACC) by comparing and contrasting it with Franklin Roosevelt’s original Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from the Great Depression era.  While both federal programs put Americans to work on a host of environmental problems, for the ACC to succeed it must avoid some of the pitfalls of the original CCC.  Maher will outline how the ACC can be more inclusive and responsive than its 1930s counterpart, and will then moderate an audience discussion regarding how Irvington might create its own local climate corps that could involve residents, students, and others interested in slowing climate change and making our village more resilient to it.