Faculty spotlights

Mac is the CEO and founder of Embercombe, a social enterprise located in Devon that seeks to 'inspire committed action towards a truly sustainable world'. He has been coaching and developing leaders from the corporate world since 1984 and has recently published his first book Finding Earth, Finding Soul.

Over a period of twenty years Mac has been mentored and coached by Native American 'Medicine' people to learn the cultural and spiritual teachings that once informed the practice of our own British indigenous culture. The values, principles, and wisdom of this tradition inform and guide all aspects of his life and work.

Doug is Founder and Director of Sewa Beats, an international rhythm and music consultancy that supports leaders to bring their heart to work. Doug brings a wealth of experience working with both private and public sector organizations around the globe — and a mission to get to the heart of the matter.

From the time when Doug started drumming at the age of nine, music and rhythm have been a constant element in his life. Inspired by the culture and traditions of African drumming, he spent six months in West Africa in 1997 learning with a number of Master Drummers.

In 2000 Doug gave up his eight-year career as a Producer of BBC documentaries to set up Sewa Beats. The company has been steadily expanding across the world, delivering high-impact, interactive management learning by combining the elemental language of music and rhythm with 21st-century training techniques.

Knowing that that there has never been a more important time for human beings to connect to each other, he believes that through listening deeply to ourselves and each other — and by being present — we can take responsibility for our behaviour to make a positive difference to the world in which we work and live.

Dr. Michael Braungart is the scientific director of EPEA Internationale Umweltforschung GmbH, which was founded in 1987 and co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. He co-founded the Hamburger Umwelt Institut in 1989, as well. These organizations share a common set of values that embrace intelligent, aesthetic and eco-effective design and seek to optimize products with the Cradle to Cradle framework.

Through these activities, Professor Braungart has developed tools to design eco-effective products and business systems and has worked with a number of organizations and companies in a range of industries. He has accepted a visiting professorship at the Darden School of Business, lecturing on such topics as eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, Cradle-to-Cradle design and Intelligent Materials Pooling, and he continues to teach at universities all over the world.

Since autumn 2008, Dr. Braungart has been named to hold a newly funded professorship at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions at Erasmus University of Rotterdam in collaboration with the TU Delft. Additionally, he has been a professor of Process Engineering at Universität Lüneburg since 1994 , and he is also serving as director of an interdisciplinary materials flow management masters program.

We are far too many on this planet for 'being less bad'

Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart

Tim Smit is a highly innovative and successful businessperson, famous for his work on the 'Lost Gardens of Heligan' and the Eden Project, both in Cornwall, England.

At the beginning of his career, Tim worked as an archaeologist before taking an unexpected leap into the music business, working as both a song-writer and producer receiving seven platinum and gold discs.

Later Tim started the Eden Project, an £80 million initiative to build two transparent biomes in an old china clay pit near the village of Bodelva. The biomes contain different eco-climates; rainforest and Mediterranean. Eden aims to educate people about environmental matters and encourages a greater understanding and empathy with these matters.

In 2006, Tim was awarded was awarded an honorary Doctor of Design degree by the University of the West of England "in recognition of his outstanding achievements in promoting the understanding and practise of the responsible management of the vital relationship between plants, people and resources, which have made a major contribution regionally, nationally and internationally to sustainable development, tourism, architecture and landscape architecture".

In the early 21st century, Tim became a Social Enterprise Ambassador. Social enterprises use a business to address a social or environmental need. The Social Enterprise Ambassadors programme is led by the Social Enterprise Coalition and is supported by the Office of the Third Sector, part of the UK government's Cabinet Office.

Alastair McIntosh is well known for his work on land reform on Eigg, in helping to stop the Harris super quarry, also for developing human ecology as an applied academic discipline in Scotland.

He has also featured in the Wall Street Journal for knocking a psychological hole in Gallagher's Silk Cut cigarette advertising campaign; served as a consultant to Groupe Credit Mutuel, France’s largest mutual bank, on the meaning of mutuality; sits (unpaid) on the Sustainability Stakeholders Panel of Lafarge, the biggest construction materials company in the world, that he helped to see off from the Harris super quarry. He is a Fellow of Scotland's Centre for Human Ecology, a Visiting Fellow of the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster, and in 2006 was appointed to an honorary position in Strathclyde University as Scotland’s first Visiting Professor of Human Ecology.

He is a regular presenter for Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Scotland and has some 200 items of published work to his name, many of which are available at www.AlastairMcIntosh.com.

"Use the very real power you have to influence events and help the world as a whole."

Alastair McIntosh