Sustainable WNC

Ian is the founder of the non-profit Sustainable Now. He is a singer/songwriter, radio/TV producer and a state certified energy consultant. As a student of global resource issues, his background also includes having co-created, produced, and performed in It's About Time, a Buckminster Fuller based mixed-media infotainment event about life aboard Spaceship Earth, our on-board flight conditions and our possibilities for the future. He produced and performed in pilot performances in the United States and the Soviet Union and was the technical director of performances with John Denver.

Ian is also the producer and host of the Green Radio Bistro. The show features co-hosts Ned Doyle, founder of the Southern Energy and Environment Expo (SEE Expo), and UNCA professor Dr. Dee Egger interviewing regional innovators from the business, government, non-profit and grassroots communities about all facets of sustainable living. A fascinating array of western North Carolinians share expertise and personal experience designed to pique every listener and viewer's interest in clean energy, alternative transportation, green building and much more. The show also features live musical entertainment with top musicians from the WNC music scene, a weekly Kid's Report and regular visits from Wiltin Corn with "The Country News and Commentary" for some good old fashioned down-home humor and country-fide wisdom. The pilot series of the Green Radio Bistro is now airing on URTV, Charter channel 20 in Buncombe County on Tuesday evenings at 9:00 PM and on WPVM radio, 103.5 FM on Wednesdays at 1:00 PM.

As a singer/songwriter, Ian also presents outreach events and house concerts throughout the WNC region that include infotainment videos about sustainability, a comedy skit with Wiltin Corn and live musical entertainment to raise the level of "sustainability literacy" around western North Carolina. The overarching objective of Ian's work is to ensure a sustainable future in the mountain region by establishing western North Carolina as the "Sustainability Capital".

Steve Cochran is an internationally-recognized and nationally-prominent leader, speaker, writer, and advocate and practitioner in the field of sustainable enterprise, working with private industry, government, academia and the non-profit world to achieve that goal.

He is the co-founder of Sustainability Strategies, LLC: an Asheville NC-based strategic planning and management consulting firm helping cross-sector clients transform and evolve themselves as sustainable enterprise. He works with a highly-diverse client base locally, nationally and internationally.

Steve serves as Chairman of the Board of the Washington DC-based United States Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, with more than three hundred multi-stakeholder and cross-sector partner organizations. The US Partnership is the national response to the United Nations ‘Decade of Education for Sustainable Development’ (2005-2014). He served as a ‘sustainable development policy’ delegate in 2006 to both the “G8 Civil Summit” in Moscow, and the United Nations “Global Civil Society Forum” in Dubai.

In Asheville, he serves on the board of the Community and Economic Development Alliance (for the “HUB” Plan), the board of the Clean Air Community Trust, the Board of Visitors of Warren Wilson College, and is the co-founder of the Sustainability Alliance of the Mountains (SAM).