Linda Marsa is an award-winning investigative journalist and a contributing editor at Discover who has covered medicine, science, health and the environment for more than two decades. She is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of FEVERED: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves (Rodale, 2013), which the New York Times called “gripping to read.” FEVERED won an honorable mention as best general nonfiction book of the year from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She has also written for U.S. News & World Report, Aeon, Popular Science, The Daily Beast and Pacific Standard, among numerous others.

A popular speaker, Linda has lectured widely on climate change at major universities, leading environmental organizations, public health institutes and for general audiences, speaking at venues like George Washington University, Emory University, UC Irvine, University of Colorado and the Public Health Institute in Oakland. She has also been an instructor at The Writer’s Program at UCLA Extension for more than two decades and was named Teacher of the Year in 1999.

Fen Montaigne is a journalist, author, and editor who specializes in the environment, science, and international affairs. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Guggenheim fellow, and former foreign correspondent who has written extensively for National Geographic magazine, Montaigne has authored or co-authored six books. He helped launch and is senior editor of Yale Environment 360, an online magazine that has won a host of awards and attracts 2.5 million visitors a year.

Fen’s latest book is the critically acclaimed Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica. The book tells the story of Bill Fraser, a U.S. ecologist who has done research in Antarctica for 40 years, documenting the decline of sea ice-dependent Adélie penguins as the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than any place on earth. Fen spent nearly five months in Antarctica as a member of Fraser’s field team. The Sunday New York Times Book Review said, “Fraser’s Penguins leaves one feeling exhilarated — by these remarkable creatures, the landscape they inhabit, and the scientists who’ve devoted their lives to studying both.” The book was excerpted in The New Yorker and Fen appeared on “The Colbert Report” to discuss Fraser’s Penguins. He lectures on Antarctic voyages run by Lindblad and National Geographic.

Fen worked for 20 years as a newspaper reporter, primarily for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as the paper’s Moscow correspondent during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fen then became a freelance writer for 12 years, traveling to every continent but Australia as he reported on the environment and international affairs. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Fen also has written for Outside, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific and contemplative studies of natural world. His book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking Penguin, 2012), was winner of the National Academies’ Best Book Award for 2013, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award, winner the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, and runner-up for the 2013 PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A profile in The New York Times said of Haskell that he “thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist.” E.O. Wilson called Haskell’s work “…a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry in which the invisible appear, the small grow large, and the immense complexity and beauty of life are more clearly revealed.”

Haskell holds degrees from the University of Oxford and from Cornell University. He is Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South, where he served as Chair of Biology. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and was granted Elective Membership in the American Ornithologists’ Union in recognition of “significant contributions to ornithology.” His scientific research on animal ecology, evolution and conservation has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, among others. He has also served on the boards and advisory committees of local and regional land conservation groups.”

Haskell’s classes have received national attention for the innovative ways they combine science, contemplation, and action in the community. In 2009, the Carnegie and CASE Foundations named him Professor of the Year for Tennessee. The Oxford American featured him in 2011 as one of the southern U.S.’s most creative teachers, and his teaching has been profiled in USA Today, The Tennesseean, and other newspapers.

He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research on his new book THE SONGS OF TREES (to be published by Viking Penguin in April 2017),  a study of humanity’s varied roles within biological networks as heard through the acoustics of trees.