American economist
Jon D. Erickson (born 1969) is an American ecological economist, professor of sustainability science and policy at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources of the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, United States, and fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment.
Career
Before joining the University of Vermont in 2002 he was assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA. He completed his Ph.D. in Natural Resource Economics at Cornell University in 1997.[1]
His research contributes to ecological economic theory and applied work on human health, sustainable development, land and biodiversity conservation, watershed planning, forest management, climate change economics, and renewable energy. This work has been published in 6 books, over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and over 100 conference papers, research reports, and press articles. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Iceland, was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania,[2] and has been a visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic and the University of Agriculture in Nitra, Slovakia. He is past president of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics and the Adirondack Research Consortium; past editor of the Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies; has served on boards of the International Society for Ecological Economics and Conservation and Research Foundation; was a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Lake Champlain Basin Program and the Vermont Governor's Council on Energy and the Environment.[3]
Erickson is also a social entrepreneur, starting and incorporating a number of non-governmental organizations and working intently at the science to policy interface. He co-founded Bright Blue EcoMedia with documentary film producer Victor Guadagno and author Amy Siedl, the non-profit media company that produced the two-time New England Emmy-award-winning Bloom film series.[4][5] Bloom is a four-part PBS series on the causes and solutions to water pollution and eutrophication in America's rivers and lakes, narrated by Academy award-winning actor Chris Cooper, and including interviews with environmental scholars Bill McKibben, Maude Barlow and John Todd.[6] His latest film collaboration was writing and directing Waking the Sleeping Giant with Jacob Smith, an award-winning, feature-length documentary on the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.[7] He also co-founded the HIV/AIDS prevention education program Futbol para la Vida with Yanlico Munesi Dusdal in the Dominican Republic (DR), modeled after the international Grassroot Soccer program and now with programs for at-risk youth throughout the DR and Haiti managed by the Dominican DREAM Project.[8] In Vermont policy development, his collaboration on the first state-level Genuine Progress Indicator[9] led to a 2012 law to initiate the use of GPI in state policy and budget analysis,[10] and his crowd-sourced media project with Bright Blue led to the Vermont legislature's declaration of March 21, 2012, as Vermont Energy Independence Day.[11][12]
