VIVA (as per friend and colleague Bram Büscher) “VIVA stands for great people doing great things to make the world a more fun, interesting, equal and sustainable place to live in.”

Here are some of these great people, working on environmental topics, shaping what political ecology looks like today.

Bram Büscher, conservation and energy scholar, theorist of Nature 2.0.  Metal connoisseur (music, not natural resource)

Paige West, brilliant environmental anthropologist, inspiration all around.

Jim Igoe, theorist, practitioner, public scholar. Go read his fantastic writings on the spectacle of nature.

Ingrid Nelson, feminist political ecologist extraordinaire.

Sabine Luning, inspiring scholar of mining around the world and across scales.

Stephen P. Reyna, mentor, friend, structural realist, the best kind of Marxist, scholar of oil.

Andrea Behrends, scholar of oil and resource wars in the Darfur-Chad region.

Kelly Swing, conservation biologist, environmentalist, director of the Tiputini biodiversity station in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Crystal Fortwangler, environmental scholar-turned-filmmaker, scholar of human-animal relations.

DECOIN, a grass-roots organization fighting against open-pit mining in the Andes.

RELUFA, a non-partisan network fighting against hunger, poverty, and environmental injustice in Cameroon.