Bio's of The Climate Dialogue Team

Linda Ellinor is an organization development consultant specializing in “Bohm-inspired Dialogue,” a communication process promoting collective conversational skills while also building trust in relationships. Her consultancy is known as the Action Dialogue Group,  http://actiondialoguegroup.com/. She also has recently co-founded The Climate Dialogue Group https://climatedialoguegroup.com/ which incorporates Dialogue into strategic conversations on our global climate crisis. She builds on 10 years of experience in corporate marketing and new product development in such firms as AT&T, International Paper Company, Exxon, and a subsidiary of the British Petroleum Corp. She has served the Center for Creative Leadership in their Leadership Development Program, and Drake, Beam, Morin as an out-placement consultant. She co-founded the US Academy of Professional Dialogue and served for 2 ½ years as its Vice President. She holds an MBA From Columbia University and has completed a PhD program in Jungian Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her book, co-written with Glenna Gerard, Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation (1998, John Wiley & Sons), has been translated into 5 languages. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Dialogue:+Rediscover+the+Transforming&i=audible&crid=1CWNQPBIV2LE8&sprefix=dialogue+rediscover+the+transforming,audible,124&ref=nb_sb_noss 

John R. Ruffin, Ph.D., has been an organization development consultant for more than 40 years, advising senior executives and their teams, from a wide range of federal government agencies to Fortune 100 corporations, in strategic planning, culture dynamics and change, and performance systems development. John has been acknowledged by his clients for his ability to identify at all levels within organizations and his dexterity in facilitating large organizational gatherings and conferences. In recent years, John has given particular attention to the development of Bohm-inspired Dialogue as a powerful communications alternative to the often debate-laden discussions that we face in a continually polarized society. He is a co-founder of The Climate Dialogue Group. John is a graduate of the doctoral program in Human and Organization Development at the Fielding Graduate University. He has written extensively during his doctoral research on the challenge of organizational founders for working in collaboration with their boards of directors, and the phenomena of “Founder’s Syndrome.” John hails from Virginia and lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

Richard P. Appelbaum, Ph.D., is Professor at Fielding Graduate University, where he heads the doctoral concentration in Sustainability Leadership. He has published extensively in the sociology of work and labor; science, technology, and society (with a focus on China’s turn to technology-based economic development); the globalization of business; urban sociology; and social theory. He is author or co-author of more than a dozen scholarly books and nearly two hundred articles and book chapters. His most recent books include Innovation in China: Challenging the Global Science and Technology System (Polity Press, 2018) and Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (Cornell University Press, 2016).  He is also co-author of a widely used introductory textbook, Sociology, now in its 12th edition (W.W. Norton, 2021). Dr. Appelbaum received his B.A. from Columbia University (1964), M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (1966), and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1971). He is also a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and former MacArthur Foundation Chair in Global and International Studies and Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara.  

David Blake Willis, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and professor of Human and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. He has a deep interest in the communitas of organizations, cultures, and systems, particularly on a global scale. His scholarly work has been on transcultural communities, immigrants, identity, transformational leadership, reimagining education, sustainability leadership, borderlands, creolization, social justice, and South Indian Dalit/Gandhian liberation movements. These interests come from 38+ years living in traditional cultural systems (Japan and India). David’s collaborative publications with colleagues include Leadership in Sustainability (2015, 2021); World Cultures: The Language Villages (2016); Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative (2011); and Transcultural Japan: At the Borders of Race, Gender, and Identity (2007).  

Harry (Rick) Moody, Ph.D., retired as Vice President for Academic Affairs with AARP and is currently Visiting Faculty at Fielding Graduate University and Tohoku University in Japan.  He previously served as Executive Director of the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College and Chairman of the Board of  Elderhostel (now Road Scholar). He is the author of many scholarly articles, and books including co-author of Aging: Concepts and Controversies. a gerontology textbook now in its 10th edition.  His book, The Five Stages of the Soul, was published by  Doubleday and has been translated into seven languages worldwide. He is the editor of the "Human Values in Aging" newsletter, with 5,000 subscribers monthly.  In 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society on Aging and in 2008 he was named by Utne Reader Magazine as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” His current book, Climate Change in an Aging Society, will be published next year by Routledge.  He lives in San Mateo, California.

Richard Heinberg is the author of fourteen books, including Power, The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth, as well as hundreds of articles and essays. He has been published in Nature, Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, and has appeared in film and television documentaries by National Geographic and Leonardo DiCaprio. He is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. He lives in Santa Rosa, California. 

Peter J. Whitehouse, MD, PhD is Professor of Neurology at Case Western Reserve University and Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto as well as current former Professor in seven other departments, including Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Nursing,  Bioethics, Cognitive Science, Psychology, History, Organizational Behavior, and Design and Innovation.field work He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and MD-PhD (Psychology) from The Johns Hopkins University (with field work at Harvard and Boston Universities, followed by Neurology Residency, Fellowship in Neuroscience and Psychiatry,  and a faculty appointment at Hopkins. In 1986 he moved to Case Western Reserve University to develop the University Alzheimer Center. At Case, he received his Master’s in Bioethics and several management credentials. He is the author of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications.  In addition to leadership roles in neurological and psychiatric associations, he has served on the board of the American Geriatrics Society and the Governing Council of the American Public Health Association. In 1999 he founded with his wife, Catherine, The Intergenerational School, a unique public multiage, community school (www.tisonline.org). He considers himself an intergenerative transdisciplinary designer and activist. His fields of endeavor are cognitive/brain health, integrated health care, intergenerational learning, interprofessional practice, deep bioethics, organizational aesthetics, narrative epistemology, transmedia performance arts, civilization transformation, and play. He occasionally performs as Sylvanus, the Tree Doctor, a metaphorical character who asks what humans can learn from trees and forests about health. Currently he leads the InterHub in the Presencing Institute (MIT) and was recently a Fellow at Oxford University. His latest forthcoming book with Danny George is American Dementia: Brain Health in an Unhealthy Society (Johns Hopkins Press, 2021) building on the previous coauthored book The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis (St. Martins Press 2008). 

Anna and her husband, Don Factor, were longtime friends and supporters of David Bohm and the process of Dialogue he envisioned. Don had first met Bohm in the 1970s in London, and the two continued their friendship from that time on. It was their early acquaintance that led to inviting Bohm to be interviewed by Don at the Human Unity Conference – a large gathering of people from many different spiritual traditions – held at Warwick University, in March of 1983. Following the enthusiastic response to this interview, Bohm was invited to present more of his thinking at a weekend conference held in Mickleton, England. It was during the ensuing weekend that what is considered to have been the very first Bohmian dialogue occurred. The transcript of the weekend has been preserved by Don Factor in the book, Unfolding Meaning. Following that weekend, Anna and Don began offering their home for dialogues among those who had been so inspired by the initial dialogue idea, and along with Peter and Jenny Garrett and David and Saral Bohm, they organized public dialogues at many locations across western Europe, Scandinavia, and Israel during the late 1980s. Stemming from these early dialogues is the well-known publication by Bohm, Don Factor and Peter Garrett, “Dialogue, A Proposal” which still is considered a cornerstone description of Bohm’s intention for dialogue. Looking back, Anna remembers David Bohm:  “He was a dear man. He really was so very kind and had a lot of humanity. I found him – and still find him – an inspiration…a lovely, lovely man.”

Dr. Nancy Glock-Grueneich, author of the TV series, The Future We Need and How to Get It and a founder of Within Reach, a network of climate strategists working within and across sectors, causes and regions. She is a thought leader in efforts to strengthen the climate movement by connecting leaders and providing structural support and strategic focus across the different causes, sectors, and regions and is directly involved in seven such efforts to form “hubs” connecting climate organizations at different levels of scale. These topics are part the focus of the new season of her TV series, website and webinars now under development. Dr. Glock-Grueneich is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education author of the Curriculum Standards Handbook for the California Community College system, including the early development of culturally inclusive curricula and online learning, and initiator of the partnered learning process, China Calling, between Shandong Youth University for Political Science and selected US colleges.