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Dr. William Rees has been a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) since 1969. He founded SCARP’s ‘Environment and Resource Planning’ concentration and from 1994 to 1999 served as director of the School. Born December 18, 1943, Bill Rees grew up on a farm in in southern Ontario, and dates his environmental awakening to a boyhood day when “I happened to glance down at my plate full of young new carrots, little potatoes, fresh lettuce, and I realized that there wasn't a single thing on the plate that I hadn't had a hand in growing. I suppose it was like an epiphany kind of experience.” He enrolled at the University of Toronto to study zoology and biology, but he was “constantly in search of what I thought should have been obvious, something called human ecology: the study of human beings as species of organism.” Failing to find that discipline, he more or less invented it. He ultimately received his Ph.D. from the Universty of Toronto in population ecology. Dr. Rees is world-famous as the originator of “ecological footprint analysis,” a quantitative tool that measures the amount of productive land and water required to sustain any given population at any particular level of consumption. The ecological footprint ultimately measures sustainability, revealing as it does whether a population's size and level of consumption can be supported by the productive capacity of the terrain occupied by that population. Footprint analysis demonstrates the fundamental incompatibility between continued material economic growth and ecological security, and has helped to re-open the international debate on human population incarrying capacity as a consideration in sustainable development. With his PhD student Mathis Wackernagel, he literally wrote the book on ecological footprints and footprint analysis. Our Ecological Footprint (1996) is now available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian and Spanish. Dr. Rees’ teaching and research have been focussed on the public policy and planning implications of global environmental trends and the necessary ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development. Much of this work is in the realm of human ecology and ecological economics, and includes human bio-ecology and the ecological basis of civilization; ecological economics; biophysical realities in resource allocation and distribution; and global change and the dynamics of societal collapse. A dynamic speaker, Bill Rees has lectured widely across Canada and the US, and around the world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Founding Fellow of the One Earth Initiative, a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. He is also a co-investigator in the "Global Integrity Project," aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation. He was awarded the 2007 Trudeau Fellowship Prize “in recognition of outstanding achievement, innovative approaches to issues of public policy and commitment to public engagement" Click Here to View or Hear the Dr. William Rees Interview
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