Who we are
Founder & senior visionary
Peter Fiekowsky
Peter is an MIT-educated physicist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist with 27 patents. He has 30 years’ experience as a citizen lobbyist for poverty and climate issues, and over the past decade has been working to build the organizations required to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity. His vision is of a planet restored to a state which we'd all be proud to hand down to our children, and a climate restored to a state that humanity has survived in the long term. Most recently, he has founded and provided initial financing for establishment of the Stable Planet Alliance.
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CEO & executive director
Dr Phoebe Barnard
Phoebe's vision is of a wiser, kinder, humbler civilization and a planet restored to its full life-supporting potential. A biodiversity scientist by background - behavioral, population, community ecology - she is a collaborative team-builder, conflict-resolver, global change scientist and policy strategist. She has worked 34 years in Namibia and South Africa founding and leading science-based national policy and strategy programs on biodiversity, climate change, and environmental futures before returning to the USA in 2017. She is full professor at University of Washington's Center for Environmental Politics and School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Science, and associate researcher at the FitzPatrick Institute and African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town.
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Chief of staff
Julia Dederer
Julia empowers leaders dedicated to transforming the challenges of our time. She has worked in transformational education for 40 years in organizational development, leadership development and group facilitation. She has worked for 30+ years as an activist and fundraiser in ending global hunger, and is a founding staff member of both the Foundation for Climate Restoration and Methane Action from her commitment to leave a world we are proud of to our children and grandchildren. She brings these commitments and skills to the Stable Planet Alliance, supporting Phoebe in organizational development.
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Alliance and resource strategist
Rob Harding
Rob Harding is a planetary health activist who cares deeply about protecting life on Earth. His superpower is serving as a connector to help accelerate the pace of progress. An accountancy graduate of Santa Clara University, Rob is committed to creating a more just and sustainable world with competence, conscience, and compassion. Rob serves on the board of The Rewilding Institute and Save The Colorado, as a trustee of the WILD Foundation, and as a chapter director for Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Communications strategist
Steve Kent
Stephen Kent is the president of KentCom LLC, a public interest and public policy PR practice he founded in 1988. It serves global, national, regional and community-based NGOs and has particular experience in peace and security, nuclear policy and nuclear abolition, climate change, environmental protection, public health, citizen diplomacy, civil rights, social and economic justice, media independence, globalization, corporate accountability and consumer protection issues.
Social media and web strategist
Kathleen Sweeney
Multimedia storyteller Kathleen Sweeney is the founder of WordCityStudio​, working at the intersection of digital art and social change. She is Assistant Professor at The New School for Public Engagement and the creator of courses such as Girl Innovators, Beyond iCelebrities, Hero(ine)s and The Viral Media Lab. Kathleen is the author of pop culture monograph Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age, Peter Lang Publishers, which is used in media studies curricula nationwide. She publishes regularly on technology, pop culture and mindfulness (recently in Lumina Journal and Afterimage) and has been cited in many outlets including The New Yorker and Gannet News.
Journalist
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Veronika Perkova
Veronika Perková is an environmental journalist who focuses on wildlife conservation and population issues. She is the host of Nature Solutionaries, a podcast about conservationists who do amazing things for nature and bring inspiration into people's lives. She is also a lecturer at Masaryk University, Czech Republic and author of the book "AskGreat Questions, Get Great Answers."
Journalist
Gresë Sermaxhaj
Gresë is a Kosovan journalist writing about young changemakers, society and social and technological change for Youth Time Magazine. She has a degree in Political Science at the University of Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo, with a background in journalism. Gresë also works as an External Public Relations Specialist for MCW Global, an organization working to empower young people as leaders in their communities.
Intern and translator
Agnes Wangui Irungu
Agnes Irungu offered her services as a volunteer intern and kiSwahili/Kikuyu translator to the Stable Planet Alliance and our project GirlPlanet.Earth. She grew up in Kenya's rural highlands, watching the effects of climate change on farming, women’s livelihoods, and land condition. Although she works by day as a customer care representative in Nairobi, she aims to use her knowledge, skills and talents to serve humanity in a broader context. Her first contribution was translating the summary of the blueprint paper ‘World Scientists’ Warning into Action, Local to Global’ into kiSwahili to increase its accessibility to Kenyan decisionmakers at different scales. You can read more about Aggie in her profile at www.girlplanet.earth.
Advisory board
Nandita Bajaj
Nandita is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a non-profit that educates about—and offers solutions to address—the impacts of human overpopulation and over-consumption on the planet, people, and animals. A humane educator and a passionate advocate for planetary health, Nandita is interested in the links between pronatalism, anthropocentrism, and overpopulation and their impacts on human rights, animal protection, and environmental preservation. She is a board member of the Canadian Society for Humane Science and has a M.Ed. from the Institute of Humane Education through its partnership with Antioch University. She teaches a “Pronatalism and Overpopulation” course at Antioch University.
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Advisory board
Wanjiku Gichigi
Wanji is a humanitarian evaluator who consults for development agencies, such as the UN World Food Programme, interested in tracking progress towards their strategic goals. Her special interests are in decolonized narratives and an improving balance between human life and the environment. Among many other things, Wanji cofounded The Mizizi Stories with a friend who also recognized the importance of inherited culture of origin and its role in building identity and confidence in individuals. The stories give young Kenyans a platform to (re)connect with their cultures, identities and roots. Through research, storytelling and essay writing, young people get a chance to own and narrate, curate and present their own realities and stories.
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Advisory board
Carter Dillard
Carter's ethics, legal and policy career started with the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and his thesis reframed the right to have children in intergenerational and child-centric terms. His new book "Justice as a Fair Start in Life" was published in Sept 2021. Carter founded the organization Having Kids, developing a human rights-based, “zero baseline” family planning model with an exponentially greater impact on sustainability and animal protection than downstream alternatives. He is Policy Director and board member of the Fair Start Movement, where future children are a specially protected class. His work has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, the New York Times, The Hill, Washington Times, International Herald Tribune and peer-reviewed journals.
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Advisory board
Karen Hardee
Karen Hardee is president and CEO of the What Works Association. She has a PhD in social demography from Cornell University, and >25 years of international technical and leadership experience working with bi- and multilateral organizations, nongovernmental organizations and as a consultant on global development and climate change, family planning, reproductive health, rights-based programming, gender, policy and program development, research and evaluation. She has published on population, reproductive health and climate change, including analysis of family planning and resilience in a population, health and environment program in Tanzania. Karen has published and spoken widely, and is a highly productive, seasoned professional with extensive international collaborations.
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Advisory board
John R Bowey
Filmmaker and multimedia director John Bowey works on big-picture issues challenging society today, from conflict resolution, health/wellness, identity, history, to sustainability, biodiversity, climate change, consciousness, technology, science, entrepreneurship, innovation, and interfaith dialogue. John has designed, directed and produced film, TV, and musical creative and technical productions in Hollywood, the Middle East, South and West Africa and the Pacific Northwest: documentaries, live TV series and concerts. He has worked with artists such as U2, Peter Gabriel and Tina Turner in the USA and Africa, traveled and worked with the Dalai Lama and the Tibet House team, and designed and produced immersive virtual reality experiences in the Middle East for high-end science centers and museums.
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Advisory board
Joe Bish
Joe is the Director of Issue Advocacy at Population Media Center. He holds a Master of Science in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing from Antioch University New England. Joe serves as a public-facing expert articulating the nuances, complexities, and interconnectedness of Population Media Center's vision and mission, projecting these within the vehicle of a strong organizational brand. He supports communications initiatives to persuade targeted audiences – both public and private, and prospective and current donors - of the value of entertainment-education strategies in international development.
Advisory board
Susan Allen
Susan Allen, MD, MPH, is a Professor in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, and the founder of the Rwanda-Zambia Health Research Group. Since 1986, Dr Allen and colleagues have researched and implemented programs to reduce HIV, unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and neglected tropical diseases. A particular focus of the work has been on data-driven resource allocation and integration and mutual leveraging of health, population, environment and conservation goals in Africa. Watch her TED Talk on HIV, health and genocide.
Advisory board
Christopher Tucker
Dr. Chris Tucker is author of A Planet of Three Billion, Chair of the American Geographical Society, Chair and CEO of The MapStory Foundation, and President of foreign policy advocacy group, Friends of the Arc. Chris emphasizes women's roles in security, stability and peacekeeping, and has served on boards like the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, Open Geospatial Consortium, Open Plans, OpenGeo, the Secretary of Interior’s National Geospatial Advisory Committee, Defense Science Board Intelligence Task Force, and DNI’s Intelligence Community Strategic Studies Group. He also advises the Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), and served on a National Academy of Science committee on its research priorities.
Advisory board
Terry Spahr
Terry Spahr directs Earth Overshoot, a nonprofit dedicated to making nature and its resources central to personal and public decisionmaking through targeted education and advocacy. Spahr, a filmmaker, naturalist and activist, is an expert on sustainability and the intersection of human consumption and population as the primary drivers of environmental destruction. He produced the 2020 documentary 8 Billion Angels, which uses compelling stories to lift the veil on a critical topic often purposely relegated to the shadows of our personal, political and international conversations. Terry graduated from the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts & Sciences and Fels Center of Government.
Olivia Walker
Editor in Chief
Dan Mitchell
Assistant Manager
Noah Patterson
Programming Editor
Tess Anderson
Art Director