Alex Steffen

Alex Steffen has been the Executive Editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organisation in 2003 as the next phase in a lifetime of work exploring ways of building a better future.

In a very short time, Worldchanging has become the leading sustainability-related publication on the Internet, with an archive of over 7,000 articles by leading thinkers around the world. It has played an important role in revealing formerly obscure innovations and groundbreaking ideas, thereby pushing forward the sustainability movement and assisting in the growth of its network.

Prior to founding Worldchanging, Steffen worked as an environmental journalist on four continents (where he wrote about everything from Japan's fast breeder reactor programme to the UN "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro). That work led him to provide strategic consultation to over 50 environmental groups (on issues like the fate of endangered species, the future of "smart growth" and "reframing" the environmental movement) and many foresight projects (anticipating, for instance, paths for a Pacific Northwest transition to sustainability, what green neighbourhoods of the future might look like, and how to prevent the next use of nuclear weapons).

He also served as president of the board of Allied Arts (the venerable Seattle urban design advocacy group), is co-founder of the Livable Communities Coalition and the Fuse Foundation, and has served on the boards or steering committees for numerous other NGOs and campaigns. Steffen's media work extends into newspaper, radio and on-air television, and he started the short-lived but influential magazine Steelhead in the mid-1990s.