Planetwalk

John Francis, Ph.D. founded Planetwalk, a non-profit environmental awareness organization. He has received a B.S. degree from Southern Oregon State College, a Masters degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana-Missoula, and a Ph.D. in Land Resources from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served as project manager for the United States Coast Guard Oil Pollution Act Staff of 1990, in Washington, DC, where he assisted in writing oil spill regulations and formulated a natural resource damage assessment model to understand better the cost of oil spills to society. For this work, he received the U.S. Department of Transportation's Public Service Commendation. In 1991, John was appointed the United Nations Environment Program’s Goodwill Ambassador to the World's Grassroots Communities. Over the years, John Francis has walked more than 20,000 miles across the United States, through the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. He recently began a walk studying organic agriculture and sustainable development in Cuba, and is developing Planetlines, an environmental education curriculum based on the walking pilgrimage for high school, college and civic organizations. His memoir Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time was published March 2005, and has now been optioned by Universal Studios for development into a feature motion-picture.