Who we are

The co-founders of the Crisis Forum are Dr. David Cromwell and Dr. Mark Levene

David Cromwell is a researcher at the internationally-renowned National Oceanography Centre, Southampton where he studies ocean circulation using satellite remote sensing, scientific data collected at sea, and ocean circulation models. David has a background in physics and astronomy, with a PhD in solar physics. He was also a Shell geophysicist for five years, working in the Netherlands. He is the author of Private Planet: Corporate Plunder and the Fight Back (Jon Carpenter, 2001) and co-author with David Edwards of Guardians of Power, the Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto Press, 2006). He is also a co-founder of Media Lens (www.medialens.org), an independent UK media watchdog that monitors and challenges mainstream media distortions, omissions and deceptions.

Mark Levene is formerly director of Peace Advertising Campaign and Changing Minds, two small media organisations aimed at changing public perceptions in favour of radical change. He is currently Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton in the History Dept. and at the Parkes Centre for Jewish: non-Jewish Relations, The first two volumes of his multi-volume work Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State were published by I.B.Tauris in 2005). He is founder of Rescue!History, and a member of the Contraction and Convergence support group.

Other forum members include:

Susan Ballard is a social learning and communication consultant in the field of environmental sustainability, currently exploring psycho-social issues through doctoral research entitled, “Awakening Collective Will in Response to Climate Change” at the Centre for Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research (SOLAR) at the University of the West of England. Susan is also a practising journalist and works regularly in the field of science communication for the UK’s Research Councils.

Dr Daniele Conversi is a a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, where he co-founded the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN). He is currently engaged in a large project on the 'war on terror' and ethnonational conflict, as well as on the relationship between environmental crises, population displacement and ethnic conflict.Web site: http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/conversi/

Srinandan Dasmahapatra has a research background in physics and computing, and has been concerned about some of the shackles of academic discipline.

Prof. Colin Feltham is Reader in Counselling at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author or editor of 20 books on counselling and psychotherapy, Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and former co-editor of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. A long-time critic of the myopic and over-individualised features of his subject and profession, he has increasingly turned towards socio-economic, historic and evolutionary explanations for our chronic malaise and current human crisis. He is now writing 'What's Wrong With Us? The Anthropathology Thesis' for Wiley.

Dr. Mayer Hillman is Senior Fellow Emeritus of Policy Studies Institute and former head of its Environment and Quality of Life Research Programme. His research has been concerned with transport, urban planning, energy conservation, health promotion, road safety and environment policies - particularly the implications of climate change. He is the author, or co-author of more than 40 books on these topics, most recently (with Tina Fawcett), How We Can Save the Planet, Penguin Books and (with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan), The Suicidal Planet, St. Martin's Press, in press. For over 35 years, he has called for environmentally-conscious attitudes to inform public policy and highlighted the moral imperative of taking account of the needs of future as well as of present generations. He was one of the first proponents of per capita carbon rationing as the only realistic way for the world’s population to prevent serious damage from climate change.

Prof. Justin Lewis is Professor of Communication and Deputy Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He joined Cardiff in 2000, having worked for 12 years in the United States at the University of Massachusetts. He has written or edited 8 books about media and politics, his most recent being Constructing Public Opinion, published by Columbia University Press. He has, in recent years, been particularly interested in media and democracy, with an emphasis on public knowledge and opinion.

He has recently completed an ESRC study on the representation of citizenship in the news media, a consultative ESRC project on the role the media plays in the public understanding of science, and was one the lead researchers on a BBC funded research project on the media and the Iraq war.

Caroline Lucas is Green Party MEP for South East England, since 1999. Member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, work has included: amending legislation to strengthen the case against GM crops, pushing for stricter controls on the regulation of chemicals, and for stricter targets on CO2 emissions to combat climate change. Member of the Committee on International Trade for which recent work includes being rapporteur for a report on EU/China Trade relations. Caroline is also: Vice President of the Animal Welfare and Consumer and Health Intergroup, President of the Globalisation Intergroup and Member of the European Parliament’s delegation to Palestine. Other areas of work include mobile phone mast safety, opposing the war in Iraq and leading the campaign to ban night flights.Recent publications include the pamphlet Taking the Cons out of the Constitution and Green Alternatives to Globalisation: a manifesto co-authored with Mike Woodin.
Web site: http://www.carolinelucasmep.org.uk/

George Marshall has 15 years experience in environmental campaigning working at all levels of the environmental movement - from small community groups to large international NGOs - and as a consultant for the German and Papua New Guinean governments. He is currently a co-ordinator of Rising Tide (www.risingtide.org.uk), a national network of grassroots climate change campaigns groups and executive director of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, a newly formed charity which prepares public information on climate change.His campaign work is split between campaigning against the causes of climate change and campaigning for lifestyle transformation. He has written a website and CD based on his own house (www.theyellowhouse.info) and is planning to co-author a manual on house eco-renovation. He also manages the Carbon Challenge project with the Centre for Alternative Technology to monitor and reduce the emissions of seven typical households.

Nicholas Maxwell has devoted much of his working life to arguing that we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that it promotes wisdom and does not just acquire knowledge. He has published five books on this theme: What's Wrong With Science? (Bran's Head Books, 1976), From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998), The Human World in the Physical Universe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and Is Science Neurotic? (Imperial College Press, 2004). He has also contributed to a number of other books, and has published numerous papers in science and philosophy journals on problems that range from consciousness to quantum theory. For nearly thirty years he taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science and Honorary Senior Research Fellow. His website URL, where more information about his life and work may be found, is: www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk

Alastair McIntosh is the author of books including Soil and Soul, Rekindling Community, and Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. His writing has been described by George Monbiot as "world-changing", by the Archbishop of Canterbury as "inspirational" and by Thom Yorke as "truly mental". A Quaker whose work is underpinned by the study of spirituality, he sees nonviolence as a central paradigm through which to reconstitute community, addressing such issues as war, poverty, and the mindless consumerism that is the cutting edge driving climate change. He guest lectures at military institutions around Europe including, since 1997, annual speaking on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the UK Defence Academy. He is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology and Visiting Professor of Human Ecology at the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde. Website: www.alastairmcintosh.com/

Marianne McKiggan is the webweaver for this site. Activist and recent graduate from Southampton University, Masters in Environmental Science, she is particularly interested in the role of the mass media in the climate crisis and more broadly in cultural influences on relationships between humans and nature.

Anthony Rudolf is a writer, translator and publisher. In the early 1980s, his Menard Press (www.menardpress.co.uk) published a series of pamphlets on the nuclear issue, including Sir Martin Ryle's Towards the Nuclear Holocaust (which sold fifteen thousand copies), Nicholas Humphrey's Four Minutes to Midnight and Solly Zuckerman's Science Advisors and Nuclear Weapons. Post 9/11, the series was briefly resuscitated when the publisher commissioned Dan Plesch to write Sheriff and Outlaws in the Global Village. Also in the early 1980s, Rudolf was one of the founders and prime movers of the group JONAH (Jews Organised for a Nuclear Arms Halt, now defunct), which was formed to bear witness within the Jewish community and, at the same time, to provide the broad protest movement with an additional religious perspective on the moral issues that possession of nuclear weapons entails.

Stefan Skrimshire is a post-doctoral researcher in the Religions and Theology department at the University of Manchester. He is interested in political, philosophical and theological responses to global crisis, and in particular the ethics of political responses to climate change (see Future Ethics project, below). He teaches an MA course, Terror and Utopia, which examines how beliefs about the future impinge on contemporary political life, from Marxist revolution to the war on terror. He is author of 'Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope' (London: Continuum, 2008).
www.manchester.ac.uk/FutureEthics

John Theobald was Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Southampton Institutehas. He had long term research interests in critical analysis of media discourse and in examining the case for ascribing to the mass media a crucial role in the formation of public values and priorities. He wrote and co-edited several books including, The Media and the Making of History (Ashgate, 2004) which investigates how the media have not just reported in a distorted fashion, but also significantly influenced the course of major historical events over the last hundred years and up to the present moment, and Radical Mass Media Criticism (Black Rose Books, 2005). He launched and co-edited the media-critical web journal Fifth-Estate-Online. He died in 2006.

Jonathan Ward

Adam Warren is an educational technologist at the University of Southampton who has campaigned locally on environmental issues for many years. He designed this website.

Prof. Dave Webb is Professor of Engineering in the Faculty of Information and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University. He has extensive background in physics, space physics, computer modelling and applied engineering and is also a co-founder of The Praxis Centre at Leeds Metropolitan, a multidisciplinary research centre for the Study of Information and Technology for Peace, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights. The writer of scores of journal papers on these and related issues he is also co-editor (with E. Halpin, S. Wright and P. Trevorrow) of Cyberwar, Netwar and the Revolution in Military Affairs (2005). Dave is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of Scientists for Global Responsibility, a council member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a member of the UK Pugwash Group and an adviser for the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation.

Prof. Steve Wright is a Visiting Professor in the School of Information, Associate Director of the Praxis Centre and an SSRC Global Security Research Fellow, Leeds Metropolitan University. His research centres on the political consequences of innovation, which began with postgraduate study at Lancaster University’s Richardson Institute, looking at 'New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control.' Alas, the work progressed too well and resulted in the intelligence agency of a foreign power, America’s NSA, instructing British Police to raid Lancaster University (motto Omnibus Patet Veritas ­ ironically “Truth Lies Open to All”). In 1985, he became Head of Manchester City Council’s Police Monitoring Unit, watching the local police force and in 1989, Director of the Omega Foundation, working with Amnesty International and the European Commission to track the transfer of military security and police technologies. In 1998, Steve authored the European Parliament’s widely influential first STOA report on the Echelon Global Spy System which revealed the extent to which all communications are read by Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill station, which taps two million calls an hour. The US ‘war against terror’ and its human rights fallout has pre-occupied him ever since and he became chair of the trustees of Privacy International in 2004. His current work covers information warfare, new border control technologies (he is a trustee of the Mines Advisory Group) and the emergence of weapons of mass paralysis.