Jonathan Parfrey and Matias Viegner

Jonthan Parfrey, director of Green LA, and Matias Viegner, writer and founder of Fallen Fruit will discuss both the utopian and pragmatic sides to building a greener Los Angeles. They will debate the macro and micro issues of bringing a city and its citizens to the figurative table around global warming and public and private fruit. Audience and participants will end the evening with food, drink and discussion.

Jonathan Parfrey is the director of GREEN LA, the region's leading environmental coalition. From 1994 to 2007, he was executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. He also currently serves as Vice-President of the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters and sits on the board of the statewide group, Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. In 2003, Mr. Parfrey was appointed to Governor Schwarzenegger's Environmental Policy Team, and was previously appointed to Governor Davis' select committee on radioactive waste disposal. He has published in the Los Angeles Times and other publications. In 1992, he received the Paul S. Delp Award for Outstanding Service, Peace and Social Justice. In 2002 he was awarded a Durfee Foundation Fellowship. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.

The GREEN LA coalition is composed of over sixty environmental and environmental justice organizations. A project of the Liberty Hill Foundation, GREEN LA is organized in a network of five workgroups tasked with improving the environment by addressing 1) public transportation, 2) energy generation, 3) Port of Los Angeles, 4) management of the urban ecosystem, and 5) the cumulative impacts of toxins on disenfranchised communities. GREEN LA also administers five projects; the most important involves drafting the public participation element of the City's global warming action plan. Read more about Green LA here.

Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who teaches in Critical Studies the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. He is a founder of Fallen Fruit, an art collaboration focusing on fruit, urban ecology and public space. He regularly writes on art for X-tra and his fiction appears in several anthologies and magazines including Cabinet, Black Clock and the Radical History Review. He's recently has co-edited two books, S?ance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects, which emerge from an annual international experimental writing conferences he directs at REDCAT in Los Angeles. As literary executor for Kathy Acker, he has written and lectured extensively on her work, editing a volume of her letters for Chiasmus Press and currently completing an academic study of her work.