Herman Daly to Receive NCSE 2010 
Lifetime Achievement Award

January 19, 2010 —

Each year, the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) awards a leader in the field of science, policy and the environment with the NCSE Lifetime Achievement Award at their annual conference. This year, NCSE has chosen to present its Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Herman Daly during its 10th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment. The theme for this year's conference is on the New Green Economy, an increasingly important topic and one that Dr. Daly begun researching nearly four decades ago. The award will be presented Thursday January 21, 2010 in the Atrium Ballroom of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington, DC.

Herman Daly is an American Economist who began researching the fusion of economics and ecology in the 1970s, highlighting the necessity to consider the laws of nature when structuring an economic system. His work supports the idea that for the human economy to subsist, it must function at a steady state within the productive and assimilative capacity of the Earth's ecosystem.

Prior to his research in ecological economics, Dr. Daly received his doctorate in Economics from Vanderbilt University in 1967 before becoming a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU). During this time he taught in Brazil at the University of Ceará and served as Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Resources and Environmental Studies of the Australian National University. He was also a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Brazil and a recipient of LSU's Distinguished Research Master Award.

In 1988, Dr. Daly changed gears and worked as Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank where he helped design guidelines for sustainable development. In 1994 he resigned, choosing to return to the world of academia, but not before giving his well known farewell speech offering "prescriptions" for the World Bank and their efforts for sustainable development (full speech found at http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/daly.html). Since then, he has been a professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland at College Park.

During this time, Daly published several articles that contradicted much of the neoclassical economic general knowledge and also as co-founded the The Journal of Ecological Economics in 1989. Other publications include For the Common Good (co-authored with John B. Cobb, Jr. - 1989; 1994), Steady-State Economics (Freeman, 1977; second edition, Island Press, 1991), and Beyond Growth (Beacon, 1996) (For a full list of publications visit: http://ecoethics.net/bib/1997/ensh-006.htm). In 1996, Dr. Daly received the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Right Livelihood Award, Sweden's alternative to the Nobel Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Sophie Prize (Norway) for contributions in the area of Environment and Development; in 2001 the Leontief Prize for contributions to economic thought, and in 2002 the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic for his work in steady-state economics.

 

Return to previous page

Contact: R. Denise Williamson
Email: rdenise@umd.edu