Duane Elgin

Duane Elgin is the co-director of the Choosing Earth Project whose work is 1) taking a big picture view of the unprecedented challenges and opportunities present in the world, and then 2) deepening our understanding for action with learning and conversations.

Duane is an internationally recognized author, educator, speaker and media activist. He has an MBA from the Wharton Business School, and an MA in economic history from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006 he received the Peace Prize of Japan—the “Goi Award”—in recognition of his contribution to a global “vision, consciousness, and lifestyle” that fosters a “more sustainable and spiritual culture.” His books include: Choosing Earth; Awakening Earth; The Living Universe; Promise Ahead; Voluntary Simplicity; and, with Joseph Campbell and other scholars, he co-authored the book Changing Images of Man.

In the early 1970s, Duane worked as a senior staff member of an unusual, joint Presidential-Congressional Commission looking 30 years into the American future. He then worked as a senior social scientist with the think-tank SRI International where he coauthored numerous studies of the long-range future, primarily for government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the President’s Science Advisor. In addition, for nearly three years while working at SRI in the early-1970s, Duane was a subject in the earliest, government-sponsored research by NASA in “remote viewing” and other intuitive capacities.

Over the past thirty years, Duane has co-founded three non-profit and trans-partisan organizations working for citizen empowerment and an effective citizen’s voice through creative uses of the new media, ranging from broadcast television to the internet. His media activism is consistently trans-partisan and ranges from building a “Community Voice” organization at the metropolitan scale (the San Francisco Bay Area) to working for the development of an “Earth Voice” organization at the planetary scale. His website is:  www.DuaneElgin.com and project website is: www.ChoosingEarth.Org