Yale Dean Receives Blue Planet Prize

The Dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has been awarded the international environmental Blue Planet Prize by the Tokyo-based Asahi Glass Foundation. The prestigious prize has been awarded annually since 1992 to two individuals or organizations that have made major contributions to global environmental conservation.

Yale Dean James Gustave Speth was awarded the prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems and for pioneering efforts to bring these issues, including global climate change, to broad international attention.”

The other recipient of this year’s prize is Harold Mooney, the Paul S. Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology at Stanford University. Speth and Mooney will be honored in a ceremony in Japan in November and each will receive an award of 50 million yen.

The prize citation observes that Speth “has devoted his career to creating and invigorating environmental institutions of extraordinary importance.” It also notes that he played a leadership role in creating the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970 and that he was among the first to call for international action on global climate change.

“In 1980,” according to the citation, “he helped to predict the current challenge to the global environment in the Global 2000 Report, as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter Administration. He then founded the World Resources Institute and led it in the search for science-based solutions to large-scale environmental threats. He went on to serve as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and focused the agency on sustainable, people-centered development. As Dean, he now seeks to help the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies become the first global school of the environment.”

Yale President Richard C. Levin said, “Gus Speth’s unwavering commitment to issues affecting the global environment makes him truly deserving of this prestigious honor. We are proud of his achievement and we are also proud to have him at the helm of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.”

Previous winners of the prize include: Norman Myers, an honorary visiting fellow at Oxford University; Lord Robert May, president of the Royal Society of London; Paul Ehrlich, director of the Center of Conservation Biology at Stanford; the late David Brower, who was chairman of the Earth Island Institute; Wallace Broecker, Newberry Professor of Geology at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University; Maurice Strong, chairman of the Earth Council; Bert Bolin, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Lester Brown, founder and president of the Worldwatch Institute.