Dekila Chungyalpa is the Founder and Director of the Loka Initiative. Known as an innovator in the environmental field, she has over two decades of experience working on building resilience, faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation. Dekila has designed and launched four unique faith-led initiatives, Khoryug in the Himalayas, Sacred Earth at the World Wildlife Fund, YETI at the Yale School of Environment, and now Loka at UW-Madison. Dekila has worked all around the world, including in the Amazon, East Africa, the Himalayas, the Mekong, and the US. She originally hails from Sikkim, a Buddhist-kingdom-turned-Indian-state in the Himalayas, and is of Bhutia origin. She is a sought after public speaker and has spoken at the American Museum of Natural History, Bioneers, Harvard, Mind and Life, National Geographic, Stanford, and Yale, and sits on the board or advisory committee for several organizations including Green The Church, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and the Society of Conservation Biology’s Religion and Conservation Working Group.

Peter Coyote has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. His work includes some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including: Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Sidney Pollack, and Jean Paul Rappeneau. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films, including Ken Burns, National Parks, Prohibition, The West, The Dust Bowl, and The Roosevelts for which he received his second Emmy in 2015. Recently, Peter has also completed Vietnam, The History of Country Music, and a six-hour series on Ernest Hemingway for Mr. Burns.

Mr. Coyote’s memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture, Sleeping Where I Fall, received universally excellent reviews, and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated as one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015.

Christiana Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016, where she oversaw the delivery of the historic Paris Agreement. Today she is the co-founder of Global Optimism, co-host of the podcast “Outrage & Optimism” and is the co-author of the book, “The Future We Choose.”

Lin Wang Gordon has dedicated over a decade to studying insight meditation (Vipassana) and has recently deepened her practice through the Tibetan Dzogchen traditions. Through her meditation journey, she discovers the transformative power of Buddhist philosophy and practices to help live a life of flow, joy, wonder, and resilience. She graduated from Mark Coleman’s Awake in the Wild Nature Meditation Teacher Training in 2017 and is currently enrolled in the Community Dharma Leaders Program (CDL7) at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Lin has gained experience leading ecodharma retreats and co-founded the Sacred Earth Sangha of the New York Insight Meditation Center. In addition to sharing earth-based practices and ecodharma, she hopes to guide others in meditation to foster inner transformation and cultivate a deeper sense of purpose and belonging in everyday life. She teaches meditation both indoors and outdoors, from city parks to wilderness.

Paul Hawken is known throughout the world for his work as an environmental activist and founder of ecologically conscious businesses. He is the author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World and Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.

Rupert Marques has practiced in the insight meditation tradition for over 30 years in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Rupert also guides wilderness rites of passage and his teaching emphasizes the role of the more-than-human world in understanding our belonging. He teaches at various retreat centers in Europe and beyond and for three years lived and worked at Ecodharma, a contemplative retreat community in the Spanish Pyrenees dedicated to exploring the role of the Dharma in the movements for social justice and ecological sustainability.

Dr. Susan Murphy Roshi is the founding teacher of Zen Open Circle in Sydney, as well as teacher for the Melbourne Zen Group, and Hobart Mountains and Rivers Zen, conducting regular online and face to face retreats each year, with strong emphasis on the potent wisdom that flows from the Zen koan tradition into all aspects of life and duty of care for this singular planet Earth. Susan is also a writer, freelance radio producer and film writer and director, as well as teaching and mentoring writing in private consultation and occasional meditation and writing retreats. Along with three books on Australian film, she is the author of Upside Down Zen (2006, 2008), Minding the Earth, Mending the World: Zen and the Art of Planetary Crisis (2011, 2012), Red Thread Zen: Humanly Entangled in Emptiness (2016), and most recently, her acclaimed A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis (2023).

Sharon Salzberg is a founding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Her latest book is Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom. She teaches the Tricycle online courses The Whole Path, Real Love, and The Boundless Heart.

Dr. Larry Ward is the co-founder of The Lotus Institute, a senior teacher in Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition of Engaged Buddhism, and the author of America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal. Dr. Ward holds a PhD in Religious Studies with an emphasis on Buddhism and the neuroscience of meditation. As a teacher, Dr. Ward interweaves insights with personal stories and resounding clarity that express his Dharma name, “True Great Sound.”

Marco Seiryū Wilkinson is a senior student at the Village Zendo. He is the author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, his work has appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and Taproot, and most recently in the anthologies Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology, the Hemera Foundation, Craigardan, and the Montalvo Arts Center. He lives in San Diego, where he is an assistant professor in the Literature Department at University of California San Diego and a forager of food and fibers wherever he can find them.

Dale S. Wright is the David B. and Mary H. Gamble Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus at Occidental College in Los Angeles where he taught courses on Asian philosophy and religion for 40 years. He is the author of books on Buddhist philosophy, including Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?, Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life, and Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to Know published by Oxford University Press. He has lived and traveled extensively throughout South and East Asia and has been a practitioner of various forms of Buddhist meditation for many years. Wright lives in Los Angeles with his wife and continues to write in several contexts, including his Substack Newsletter: Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live.

Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD is the author of A Future We Can Love, described as “medicine for despair and anxiety about climate change.” She is the former President of the Mind & Life Institute, a globally impactful non-profit co-founded by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. With a clinical foundation in nursing, Susan completed a PhD in psychoneuroimmunology and postdoctoral training in behavioral medicine and psycho-oncology. She received one of the first NIH R01 grants to study meditation while at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; and in 2021, she was recognized by Mindful as one of “the most powerful women in the mindfulness movement.” She is also the author of Leaves Falling Gently (Shambhala, to be released May 2025). Through her current work (coming-to-life.com), Susan guides and counsels individuals and groups in purpose-full living and dying.