As senior vice president of Documentary Film at Participant Media, Elise Pearlstein manages the company’s slate of feature documentaries from development to release.

Prior to joining Participant as a full-time employee, Pearlstein produced four feature documentaries for the company, including “Food, Inc.,” “State 194,” “Last Call at the Oasis,” and “Misconception.” Pearlstein’s additional credits as a producer include “Protagonist,” released theatrically by IFC Films, “The Living Museum” for HBO, “The Guide,” and the three-minute “Meet Mr. Toilet” which has received over one-million views on-line. She also co-produced and co-wrote “Smoke and Mirrors: A History of Denial,” a feature documentary about the tobacco industry’s manufacturing of doubt that was short listed for the 2000 Academy Awards.

Pearlstein created her first film in 1998, a portrait of the iconic Los Angeles hot dog stand Pink’s, and went on to produce and write long-form documentaries for Bravo, MSNBC, Discovery, NBC News and ABC News. From 2000 to 2005, working with executive producer Craig Leake, Pearlstein produced and wrote prime-time documentaries for Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. She is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and served on the board of the International Documentary Association.

Adán Otega has a 30-year history of handling complex strategic planning, and communications challenges excelling in the water and natural resources arena in California.  Before founding Ortega Strategies Group in 2009, Adán was deputy managing director of Rose & Kindel; vice president of external affairs at the Metropolitan Water District of southern California; Chief Deputy Secretary of State in California; and assistant general manager of West and Central Basin Municipal Water Districts. Adán is a former board member of the California Water Commission, the State Board of Food and Agriculture, Heal the Bay, the National Audubon Society, and Whittier College.

Oliver Morton writes about scientific and technological change and their effects. He concentrates particularly on the understanding and imagining of planetary processes. He’s a senior editor at The Economist. He was previously chief news and features editor at Nature and editor of Wired UK, and has contributed to a wide range of other publications. He writes on subjects from quantum physics to synthetic biology and moviemaking.

He’s authored three books: “Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World” (2002); “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet” (2007), a book of the year in The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement; and “The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World” (2015).

Oliver is also an honorary professor in Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London and has a degree in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. He lives with his wife in Greenwich, England. The Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named in his honour.

Steve McCormick serves as Venture Partner at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. He is responsible for identifying and supporting DRK Entrepreneurs. Steve currently serves on the board of DRK grantees Cloud to Street, DIGDEEP, and Replate. 

Steve is co-founder and CEO of The Earth Genome, which is developing the first global information platform on ecosystem services and natural capital. The goal is to guide better decision-making on sustainability in the private and public sectors.

Steve served as president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the U.S., from 2007-2014. Before that he worked for The Nature Conservancy for thirty years, beginning in 1977 as western regional legal counsel, and eventually serving as President and CEO from 2000-2008.

Steve is a recipient of the Chevron Conservation Award, the Edmund G. Brown Award for Environmental and Economic Balance, the John Pritzlaff Conservation Award, and the California League of Conservation Voters’ Conservation Leadership Award. Steve holds a B.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California at Berkeley (1973), and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of Law (1976).

Mr. Karsner is a leading corporate innovation strategist and accomplished energy entrepreneur, policymaker, regulator and diplomat with more than three decades of global conventional and renewable energy experience, spanning every natural resource. He is Senior Strategist at X (formerly Google X), the innovation lab of Alphabet Inc., where he is part of the executive leadership team, shaping strategy for technology, policy, and commercialization at the nexus of natural resources and AI, machine learning, geospatial engineering, and high performance computing.

He began his career developing large scale energy infrastructure and has led or contributed to project development, management and finance enabling significant value creation on six continents. As a private equity investor, venture partner and advisor, his portfolios have included some of the most successful clean tech startups of the past decade, including Nest (AI), Tesla (mobility), Recurrent (solar), Codexis (biotech) and Carbon (3D printing).

From 2005 to 2008, he served as US Assistant Secretary of Energy, responsible for multi-billion dollar federal R&D programs and National Laboratories. In this role, he was on point to assemble significant bipartisan coalitions to implement or enact the Energy Policy Act (2005), the Energy Independence and Security Act (2007), and the America Competes Act (2008), all of which remain foundational to the framework of federal energy policy and regulation today.

Mr. Karsner exercised a discrete diplomatic and security role as a principal representative of the United States in the negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other bilateral energy and environmental technology accords.

From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Karsner served as Managing Partner of Emerson Collective, an investment platform funding non-profit, philanthropic and for-profit portfolios advancing education, health, immigration, the environment, and other initiatives. Along with Emerson’s Founder and Principal, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mr. Karsner co-founded Emerson Elemental (since spun out as Elemental Labs) with a deep focus on market-based solutions and technologies addressing conservation and climate change.

Mr. Karsner is Executive Chairman of Manifest Energy, an energy technology development and investment firm he founded in 2008. Earlier in his career, from 1999 to 2006, Mr. Karsner was Founder and Managing Director of Enercorp, a private company involved in international project development, management, and financing of clean and sustainable energy infrastructure. Enercorp was international agent and partner to Vestas and a pioneer in large scale wind power plant design and development. He has also worked with Tondu Energy Systems of Texas, Wartsila Power Development of Finland, and other multi-national energy firms and developers managing a wide array of conventional and renewable sources of energy.

Mr. Karsner has served on the Board of Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), a leading semiconductor equipment company, since 2008. He has also served as a director of numerous privately held companies and non-profit organizations, including Conservation International. He is a Precourt Energy Scholar at Stanford University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and serves on the Schultz-Stephenson Energy Task Force at the Hoover Institution, and has been an Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School addressing the geopolitics of energy technology. He serves on the Advisory Boards of MIT Medialab and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and member of the Trilateral Commission. He was formerly a member of the National Petroleum Council, and boards of the Gas Technology Institute and University of Chicago’s Argonne National Lab.

Mr. Karsner holds a BA with honors from Rice University and an MA from Hong Kong University.

Crystal brings to The Libra Foundation a wealth of domestic and international experience across a broad spectrum of equity-focused issues. For six years, Crystal lived in Singapore where she built bridges between civil society and emerging donors in Southeast Asia to address income inequality and climate change. As managing director of the Aspen Institute’s Environmental Fellowship, Crystal designed a global leadership program focused on the food system’s impact on the environment.

Feeding her interest in equitable health care, Crystal was CEO of the Blue Shield of California Foundation where she spearheaded work to achieve universal health coverage. She was also part of the founding team at The California Wellness Foundation where she led a groundbreaking initiative to shift youth violence prevention from a criminal justice issue to a public health effort.

She has served on the boards of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Northern California Grantmakers, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, and Grantmakers in Health. Most recently Crystal was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to serve on the California State Board of Food and Agriculture. She has also lived and worked in China and Mexico.

Born and raised in Florida, Crystal is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. She and her husband live in the Bay Area with their two teenage sons.

Ashley Boren has directed strategy, growth and operations at Sustainable Conservation since 1997. As executive director she partners with business, agriculture and other stakeholders to find, test and scale environmental solutions that make economic sense. She’s worked in the private and nonprofit sectors, drawing on both to inform her current role and conservation goals. Boren also serves on the California State Board of Food and Agriculture, the UC California’s President’s Advisory Commission for the Division Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Executive Committee of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute’s External Advisory Board at UC Davis.

In 2007, she received the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for her “unwavering commitment to innovative, balanced problem-solving to address a variety of critical environmental problems facing California.”

David Biello is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on the environment and energy since 1999—long enough to be cynical but not long enough to be depressed. He’s currently the science curator for TED. Prior to this he was the Environment and Energy Editor at Scientific American, where he’s been a contributor since 2005. He has also written for Aeon, Foreign Policy, The New York Times and New Republic. David has been a guest on numerous television and radio shows, and he hosts the ongoing du Pont-Columbia award-wining documentary Beyond the Light Switch as well as The Ethanol Effect for PBS. He is also the author of The Unnatural World.

He received a BA in English from Wesleyan University and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University. He currently lives with his wife, daughter, and son near a Superfund site in Brooklyn.

Kathryn Sullivan most recently served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—she is also the first American woman to walk in space. Prior to being Under Secretary and Administrator, Sullivan played a central role in directing Administration and NOAA priority work in the areas of weather and water services, climate science and services, integrated mapping services and Earth-observing capabilities. She also provided agency-wide direction with regard to satellites, space weather, water, and ocean observations and forecasts to best serve American communities and businesses.

During President Obama’s administration Sullivan played a major part in the ongoing effort to maintain the healthy functioning of the nation’s fisheries and aquaculture industry. Both of which are considered central to NOAA’s resilience priority, and crucial to global food security along with ocean sustainability.