Richard B. Norgaard

Richard B. Norgaard is Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley. Among the founders of the field of ecological economics, his research emphasizes how the resolution of complex socio-environmental problems challenges modern beliefs about science and policy, and explores development as a process of coevolution between social and environmental systems.

Norgaard is the author of one book, co-author or editor of five additional books, and has over 200 other publications in environmental and ecological economics, environmental sociology, environmental epistemology, and other fields. He is among the 1000 economists in the world most cited by other economists (Millennium Editions of Who’s Who in Economics, 2000) and was one of ten American economists interviewed in The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists (2004). The American Association for the Advancement of Science elected him to the status of Fellow in 2007. His writing is informed through work on energy, water, environment, and development issues around the globe with different periods of his career emphasizing Alaska, Brazil, and California.

He chaired and continues to serve on the Delta Independent Science Board of the Delta Stewardship Council. He previously served on the advisory board of NSF’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. EPA, as a member of the U.S. committee of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, and on numerous panels of the National Research Council and the former Office of Technology Assessment.

Norgaard served on the founding Board of Directors of the New Economy Coalition, on climate science advisory boards to Tsinghua University and Beijing Normal University, on the Board of EcoEquity, and on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. He served as President of the International Society for Ecological Economics and was founding Chair of the Board of Redefining Progress. He was a Project Specialist with the Ford Foundation in Brazil from 1978 to 1979 and a visiting research fellow at the World Bank in 1992.

He received his B.A. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, M.S. in agricultural economics from Oregon State University, and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1971.

Richard Norgaard is a river runner who guided David R. Brower, Eliot Porter, Philip Hyde, and members of the Sierra Club in the Glen Canyon in the early 1960s. He has rowed the Grand Canyon 4.5 times.