Bryan Welch’s history as a green media mogul dates back to his start as an environmental journalist, long before he purchased Mother Earth News a few years back. Fueled by the magazine’s success, Welch wrote Beautiful and Abundant in 2010 as a means of providing readers green inspiration to work toward in the future. Welch geared the book toward people from all walks of life — social, economic and otherwise — with simple ideas of how we must unite to create the kind of earth that future generations can be proud of. As Welch asks, “That’s something we all have in common. Who disagrees about this?” “The book is an effort to engage people in the discussion, and in the process, the visualization,” he explains. “The only way it happens is through a process of billions of human imaginations.”

The Huffington Post named Michel Nischan a “gamechanger,” and it’s easy to see why: The green eating aficionado is a co-founder and CEO of Wholesome Wave and a storied restaurateur and chef with a long history of farm-to-table sourcing. But it wasn’t until his son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes that his motivation really took form. Nischan mentions that underserved communities, both urban and rural, don’t have access to sustainable, fresh, healthy food sources, and some do not even realize that they’re missing out. Yet Nischan found that many people would want to eat better and more sustainably if they had affordable means to do so. He co-founded Wholesome Wave in 2007 to serve that very purpose. “There are federal benefits that exist that are so thinly spread that there is not enough for folks to feed their families well,” Nischan says. “We go into communities and provide an incentive. If these folks come to a farmer’s market or a farm stand or a CSA and spend their money on locally grown fruits and vegetables, we double their money.” Podcast: Play in new window | Download (45.6MB)