EARTH & ITS HUMANS: BIG-PICTURE HISTORY IN A HURRY
Participant Backgrounds
Don Hooper has serious environmental credentials to go with political skills. He believes his role is to make the planet a better, more habitable, and socially just place. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, southern Africa, he taught bricklaying, biology and African history. In the late ‘70s through the mid ‘90s, Hooper battled for environmental sanity at the Vermont Natural Resources Council, then served in the Vermont Legislature and ultimately was elected Secretary of State. Meanwhile, for more than three decades, Don’s wife Allison Hooper built a substantial specialty cheese business, Vermont Creamery. Until he chose to stop working for pay in 2016, Don loved his regional representative job with the National Wildlife Federation. His special passion is taking action to reverse climate change.
Bea Rogers is Professor of Economics and Food Policy at the Friedman Nutrition School at Tufts University and Chair of the Division of Food and Nutrition Policy and Programs. She focuses on the economic, political, and social science dimensions of global nutrition challenges. Her experiences after graduation, traveling around the world by road, triggered an interest in poverty and hunger in the developing world. She is an economist whose research focuses on economic determinants of household food consumption, including price policy and food aid. Rogers has received awards honoring her mentorship of doctoral students. She is a Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition and received the ASN Kellogg Prize for International Nutrition Research in 2017.
Terry Vogt is a recovering polluter. After 30 years in international finance and private equity investing focused on Brazil, he took a flier and ended up managing an international organization he had never heard of in a field he knew nothing about in a country he had never visited. It was a dream job. Three years later, he left that position at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture in Costa Rica and joined the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation for a few years as director of sustainable conservation finance. His sunset job is at a small bleeding edge company creating carbon offsets in tropical forests. It took a long time, but he thinks he finally shed his pollution stigmata. Somewhere along the way he managed to receive the Order of Rio Branco from the Brazilian Government.