"Inspiring Action for Nuclear Abolition"
National Grassroots Conference - August 16-19, 2007
University of California, Santa Barbara

Speakers

Darwin BondGraham - Born in 1981, the year of Ronald Reagan and a global nuclear stockpile topping 56,000 weapons, Darwin grew up in a comfortable northern California suburb feeling that something wasn't quite right with the world. He's a sociology graduate student, nuclear abolitionist, radical pacifist, and community activist who divides his time between Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Santa Rosa, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ester Ceja has been the Outreach Director for the Snake River Alliance for the last 4 years. She received her MPA with an emphasis in natural resources and environmental policy from Boise State University in May 2003. Her previous work experience includes working for the Forest Service, American Ecology Corp., researcher with the Sawtooth Society and served as program associate with the Environmental Finance Center working on watershed funding and capacity assessments for the states of Idaho and Alaska.

Andrew Lichterman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has worked on peace and environmental issues since the 1960s, having starting out as a high school anti-war activist and alternative newspaper editor. As a lawyer, he has represented peace and environmental activists in a variety of settings, and also taught law at alternative law schools for many years. In recent years his main focus has been on the abolition of nuclear weapons, and on making connections between that work and broader movements for real human security–for peace, economic equity, and a society more in balance with the planet. He has authored dozens of ground-breaking articles and research studies on nuclear weapons, militarization, and the capacity of grassroots social movements to organize for structural change.

Pamela Meidell is a writer, and the founder/director of the Atomic Mirror, a United Nations-affiliated non-profit program dedicated to reflecting the truths of our nuclear era and transforming them through creativity and the arts. She served as the first international coordinator of Abolition 2000, of which the Atomic Mirror is a founder, and now sits on its Global Council. In 1995, she reported daily from The Hague on the Oral Hearings phase of the International Court of Justice case on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. As convener (with Dr. Gabino Aguirre, Mayor of Santa Paula) of the Abolition Now-Ventura County initiative, she works with local organizations to engage Ventura County's mayors and cities in creating ways to help local democracy flourish, and keep our communities safe and awake to nuclear issues. She has created and produced four performance pieces on nuclear themes that have been presented around the world.

David Meieran is a Pittsburgh-based activist who has worked on AIDS, queer, antiwar, civil liberties and global justice issues. For the past few years, David has been a volunteer organizer with the Thomas Merton Center and Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG), which has a vibrant, ongoing counter-recruitment campaign. Through POG and other groups, David has worked to expose and confront the extensive military ties found at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a gradaute student until 2003. David was also a member of the recent UPRISE Tour, which toured the Rustbelt with Iraq vets to advance regional counter-recruitment efforts and link the issues of war and military recruitment to corporate globalization. David is also helping to develop the national network of activists working against war profiteers that grew out of a recent War Resisters League conference.

Julia Moon Sparrow is a founder of the Shundahai Network, a Nevada-based group dedicated to breaking the nuclear chain by building alliances with indigenous communities and environmental, peace and human rights movements. She has been active in peace and environmental struggles since the 1989 Redwood Summer campaign. Shundahai is a Western Shoshone (Newe) word meaning “peace and harmony with all creation.” The organization seeks to abolish all nuclear weapons and put an end to nuclear testing, with a particular focus on ending both U.S. nuclear testing and the dumping of radioactive wastes on the land of the Western Shoshone people. The group was founded at the request of the late Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney.

Will Parrish is a community organizer, activist, and facilitator who has served as Youth Empowerment Director at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation since 2005.  He graduated with honors from UC Santa Cruz in 2004, only to have his diploma temporarily withheld by UCSC’s upper-administration as a penalty for organizing a protest.  In the past six years, he has worked as part of several environmental, anti-war, anti-imperialist, nuclear abolition, and indigenous solidarity projects.

Erin Placey is the New Hampshire Youth Organizer for the American Friends Service Committee. In collaboration with New Hampshire Peace Action, she has facilitated workshops about the basic information regarding nuclear weapons for high school youth (i.e. who has them, what is the Non-Proliferation Treaty and why is it important, as well as what a nuclear weapon is capable of). Prior to the TOTB conference, she is attending the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan.

Shigeko Sasamori, C.E.O. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Projects, L.L.C., is a survivor (hibakusha) of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. At the time of the bombing, she was a thirteen-year old schoolgirl who had been mobilized with thousands of other students to clear debris from the streets of Hiroshima. On her first day at work, August 6th 1945 she was about 1.5 kilometers away from the epicenter when she heard the airplane that dropped the bomb on a largely civilian population. She was severely burned by radiation.  In the later 1940’s Shigeko and 24 other women were befriended by the American writer, diplomat, and humanitarian, Norman Cousins, who later adopted them and brought them to the United States.  She has worked tirelessly to raise public awareness about the dangers that nuclear weaponry pose to all life on earth, including through her starring role in the widely-acclaimed documentary “Shigeko, Go On!”

Monika Szymurska is former coordinator of Abolition 2000 New York City and currently serves as Program Director of the Atomic Mirror in Port Hueneme, CA.