People

Paul Raskin

President

Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute. The overarching theme of Dr. Raskin’s work has been the development of visions and strategies for a transformation to more resilient and equitable forms of social development. Toward this larger aim, his research has spanned issues (energy, water, climate change, ecosystems, and sustainable development) and spatial scales (local, national, and global). He has conceived and built widely used models for integrated scenario planning for energy (LEAP), freshwater (WEAP), and sustainability (PoleStar). Dr. Raskin has published widely and served as a lead author for the U.S. National Academy of Science’s Board on Sustainability, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Earth Charter, and UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook.

In 1995, he convened the Global Scenario Group to explore the requirements for a transition to a sustainable and just global civilization. The Group’s 2002 valedictory essay—Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead—became the point of departure for the Great Transition Initiative that Dr. Raskin launched in 2003 and continues to direct. His recent book, Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization, updates and expands his thinking on the shape of the global future.

Dr. Raskin received a PhD in theoretical physics from Columbia University in 1970, and taught at the university level before co-founding the Tellus Institute in 1976.

Visions of a Sustainable World

Yale University interview with Paul Raskin

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10 minutes    |    110,248 Views

Global Futures: The GT Alternative

A step-by-step explanation (Harvard lecture)

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34 minutes

John Stutz

Senior Fellow

John Stutz is vice president and a founding member of the Tellus Institute. His work has addressed utility regulation, energy policy, waste management, and sustainable consumption. He has appeared as an expert witness before regulatory bodies throughout the US and Canada. A central theme of Dr. Stutz's research has been human well-being as it relates to values, affluence, and the environment. He is a founding member of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI).

Previously, Dr. Stutz served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the State University of New York at Albany, where he received tenure; and Fordham University, where he was co-director of the program in mathematics and economics. He received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1969.

Allen White

Senior Fellow

Allen White is vice president and senior fellow at the Tellus Institute and directs the Institute’s Program on Corporate Redesign. His work to foster corporations dedicated to creating and sustaining social mission has included co-founding the Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org) in 1997 and Corporation 20/20 (www.corporation2020.org) in 2004. He has brought his expertise on sustainability strategy, policy, tools, and standards to projects for such multilateral organizations as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank; foundations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the UN Foundation; numerous Fortune 500 companies; US EPA; and NGOs such as Oxfam and People4Earth. Dr. White has held faculty and research positions at the University of Connecticut, Clark University, and Battelle Laboratories, and is a former Fulbright Scholar in Peru. He has served on boards, advisory groups, and committees for numerous organizations advancing new corporate forms and economic approaches. He is co-author of Corporate Environmentalism in a Global Economy and has published and spoken widely on corporate design, sustainability, accountability, and governance.

Dr. White received a PhD in geography from Ohio State University.

Tariq Banuri

Associate Fellow

Tariq Banuri is the former chairman of the Pakistani Higher Education Commission, an independent, constitutionally established institution, with a mandate to finance, oversee, regulate, and accredit all institutions of higher learning in Pakistan. He is a professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. He previously served as associate director of the U.S.-Pakistan Centers for Advanced Studies in Water at the University of Utah and director of the UN Division for Sustainable Development. Earlier, he had been instrumental in the design of a number of institutions and networks on sustainable development, including the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP), the Asia Centre of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the UN Office of Sustainable Development (UNOSD), the Ring Alliance, the Sustainable Mekong Research Network, the Human Development Foundation of North America, and the Great Transition Initiative.

Halina Brown

Associate Fellow

Halina Brown is Professor Emerita of Environmental Science and Policy at Clark University. She is currently a chairperson of the Citizens Commission on Energy in Newton, Massachusetts, and played a leading role in producing the Newton Climate Action Plan. Her scholarly research has included environmental risk assessment, national and international environmental policy, corporate environmental management, the institutionalization of sustainability reporting, socio-technical transitions, and sustainable consumption. She has served as a chief toxicologist at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, a visiting professor at several universities, and a member of numerous committees of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a co-founder of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Society for Risk Analysis. She received a PhD in chemistry from New York University in 1976.

Maurie Cohen

Associate Fellow

Maurie Cohen is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has held prior academic positions at the University of Leeds, Binghamton University (State University of New York), Mansfield College (Oxford University), and Indiana University. Dr. Cohen is a co-founder of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), an international knowledge network comprising academics, policy makers, and practitioners working at the interface of material consumption, sustainable systems innovation, and economic transition. He also serves as the editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy, an open-access e-journal dedicated to the wide dissemination of scholarly research and professional insights on sustainability. His books include Sustainability, The Future of Consumer Society: Prospects for Sustainability in the New Economy, Innovations in Sustainable Consumption: New Economics, Socio-technical Transitions, and Social Practices (with Halina Brown and Philip Vergragt), and Risk in the Modern Age: Social Theory, Science, and Environmental Decision Making. He holds a PhD in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Felix Dodds

Associate Fellow

Richard Falk

Associate Fellow

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law at Queen Mary University London, and research associate at the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He directs the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His recent books include On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, edited with Victor Faessel and Michael Curtin. He is the author or co-author of many books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance, Explorations at the Edge of Time, Revolutionaries and Functionaries, The Promise of World Order, Indefensible Weapons, A Study of Future Worlds, and This Endangered Planet.

Gilberto Gallopín

Associate Fellow

Gilberto Carlos Gallopín has had a long international career as a sustainability scientist, scenario builder, and systems analyst. He has worked for the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and the Fundación Bariloche, Argentina. From 1995 to 2002, he served as Co-coordinator of the Global Scenario Group, the international and interdisciplinary forerunner of GTI.

Jayati Ghosh

Jayati Ghosh is a development economist Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She taught economics for more than three decades at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on globalization, international finance, employment patterns in developing countries, and gender and development. She is one of the founders of the Economic Research Foundation in New Dehli, a charitable trust devoted to progressive economic research; Executive Secretary of the International Development Economics Associates, a network of economists critical of the mainstream economic paradigm of neoliberalism; and a member of the United Nations High-level Advisory Board (HLAB) on Economic and Social Affairs. She has consulted for a variety of intergovernmental organizations, including the ILO, UNDP, and UNCTAD. Her published works include the co-edited Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, Demonetisation Decoded, India and the International Economy, Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India, and The Market that Failed: A Decade of Neoliberal Economic Reforms in India.

Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016, he has been director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey in the UK, where he is also Professor of Sustainable Development. From 2004 to 2011, he was Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, where his work culminated in the publication of Prosperity without Growth (2009/2017), which was subsequently translated into 17 foreign languages. His latest book is Post Growth – Life after Capitalism. Jackson received an MA in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario and a PhD in physics from the University of St Andrews. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the Belgian Royal Academy of Science. In addition to his academic work, he is an award-winning dramatist with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.

Giorgos Kallis

Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist, political ecologist, and Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Barcelona. He is the coordinator of the European Network of Political Ecology and editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (2014). His research is motivated by a quest to cross conceptual divides between the social and the natural domains, with particular focus on the political-economic roots of environmental degradation and its uneven distribution along lines of power, income, and class. His current work explores the hypothesis of sustainable degrowth as a solution to the dual economic and ecological crisis. He was previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the Energy and Resources group at UC Berkeley, and he holds a PhD in environmental policy from the University of the Aegean.

Marjorie Kelly

Associate Fellow

Marjorie Kelly is a distinguished senior fellow at The Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit research and consulting organization that specializes in community wealth building. Among the projects she currently heads up is a Learning/Action Lab assisting a half-dozen Native American nonprofits launch social enterprises and employee-owned companies. Kelly has led a variety of consulting and research projects in corporate social responsibility, rural development, and impact investing for organizations like the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. Her books include The Making of a Democratic Economy: Building Prosperity For the Many, Not Just the Few (with Ted Howard), Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution (2012), and The Divine Right of Capital (2003). She was co-founder, and for twenty years president, of Business Ethics magazine, and the co-founder of Corporation 20/20, a multi-stakeholder initiative to envision and advocate enterprise and financial designs that integrate social, environmental, and financial aims. She is a board member of Salem Alliance for the Environment and on the advisory board of the Sustainable Business Academy.

She holds an MA in Journalism from the University of Missouri.

Ashish Kothari

Ashish Kothari is a founder-member of Kalpavriksh, a civil society organization in India focusing on environment and development issues. He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and is Professor of Practice at National Law School and University (Bengaluru) and guest faculty in several other universities in India and abroad. He coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan, served on Indian government committees to formulate the National Biodiversity Act and National Wildlife Action Plan, and served on boards or steering committees of two IUCN commissions, Greenpeace International & India, and the ICCA Consortium. A long-standing member or supporter of several people’s movements, he helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and Radical Ecological Democracy processes. He is (co)author/(co)editor of several books, including Birds in our Lives, Churning the Earth, Alternative Futures, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary.

Mary Mellor

Mary Mellor is Emeritus Professor at Northumbria University, where she was founding Chair of the University’s Sustainable Cities Research Institute. She has published extensively on alternative economics integrating socialist, feminist, and green perspectives. In 2017, she received the Bernardo Aguilar Award by the US Society for Ecological Economics in recognition of her contributions to inspiring students through teaching, research, ideas, and mentoring in the field. Her books include Feminism and Ecology, The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public Resource, Debt or Democracy? Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice, and Money: Myths, Truths and Alternatives. She holds a PhD from Newcastle University.

Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of twenty books, including the three-million-copy Diet for a Small Planet. Her latest is Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies, which dives into the roots of the American disinformation crisis and shares lessons from democracies leading the fight to combat harmful lies and promote truth. She is co-founder of Oakland-based Food First and the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. The recipient of nineteen honorary degrees, she has been a visiting scholar at MIT and U.C. Berkeley and in 1987 received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “Alternative Nobel.”

Rasigan Maharajh

Associate Fellow

Rasigan Maharajh is the founding chief director of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation in the Faculty of Economics and Finance at Tshwane University of Technology, where his research has focused on critiquing the political economy, innovation systems and public policies in the context of the global knowledge commons, economic development, social cohesion, and democratic governance. Prior to his return to academia in 2004, he was Head of Policy at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (1997–2004) and National Coordinator of the Science and Technology Policy Transition Project for South Africa's first democratic government (1995–1997). He is an active member of the Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence-building Systems (Globelics); the Steering Group of the South Africa Forum for International Solidarity; and the National Executive Committee Subcommittee on Education of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU). He holds a PhD from the Forskningspolitiska Institutet of Lund University in Sweden.

Adil Najam

Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He has also taught at MIT and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, served as director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, and served as vice chancellor of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He remains a Professor of International Relations and of Earth & Environment. He was a co-author for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), work for which the scientific panel was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the public understanding of climate change science. His books include Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community, Trade and Environment Negotiations: A Resource Book, Envisioning a Sustainable Development Agenda for Trade and Environment, Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia, and Civic Entrepreneurship.

Heikki Patomäki

Heikki Patomäki is a social scientist, activist, and Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki. Previously, he worked as a full professor at the University of Nottingham Trent (1998–2003) and RMIT University (2007–2010). He has published over 20 books, 200 research papers, and hundreds of popular articles and blogs on such topics as the philosophy and methodology of social sciences, peace and futures studies, and global political economy, justice, and democracy. His most recent book is The Three Fields of Global Political Economy. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, a founding member of the new Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy, vice chair of the EuroMemo network for 2021–2023, and a participant in the activities of the DiEM25 movement-party. He holds a PhD from the University of Turku.

Chella Rajan

Associate Fellow

Sudhir Chella Rajan is Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Coordinator of the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Tellus Institute, where he worked on energy scenarios and global politics and institutions. He has an extensive research background in transportation, energy systems, and the institutional and political context of environmental policymaking. He is broadly concerned with the interactions among social, political, technological, and environmental factors relating to sustainable development. His research has included energy and environmental scenario analyses, the politics of automobility and pollution control, power sector reform in developing countries, and analysis of institutional reform measures to reduce corruption. Prior to joining the Tellus Institute, he worked at the California Air Resources Board and the International Energy Initiative and as an independent consultant for the United Nations Development Programme. He holds a PhD in environmental science and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kate Raworth

Kate Raworth is an economist focused on making economics fit for the twenty-first century. Her book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist is an international bestseller that has been translated into 18 languages, and was long-listed for the 2017 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award. She is co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, working with cities, business, communities, governments and educators to turn Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action. She teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and is Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Raworth was previously a senior researcher at Oxfam (2001–2013), a co-author of the United Nations' Human Development Report (1997–2001) and a fellow of the Overseas Development Institute, working as an economist in the Ministry of Trade, Industries and Marketing, Zanzibar (1994–1997).

William Rees

William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus, and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. His research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the implications of global ecological trends for the human prospect, and he has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed and popular articles. He is best known as the originator and co-developer (with his graduate students) of “ecological footprint analysis,” which shows that the world is far into overshoot. He is a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative, and a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute. He is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada and recipient of a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship and both the international Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize (jointly with Dr Mathis Wackernagel). He received a PhD in population ecology from the University of Toronto.

Juliet Schor

Associate Fellow

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her PhD is in economics, which she taught at Harvard from 1984 to 1995. Her most recent book is After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back. Schor is also the author of the national best-seller The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy. Her current research topics include the gig economy and the future of work, time use, the “algorithmic workplace,” and the drivers of carbon emissions. Schor is also the co-chair of the Better Future Project, a Massachusetts-based climate activist organization.

Gus Speth

Associate Fellow

Gus Speth is a fellow at the Vermont Law School and a distinguished next system fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. In 2009, he completed his decade-long tenure as Dean of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1993 to 1999, Gus Speth was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, Professor of Law at Georgetown University, chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (Carter Administration), and senior attorney and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books, including America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy and Angels by the River . He currently serves on the boards of the New Economics Institute, Center for a New American Dream, Climate Reality Project, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities. He is an honorary director of the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gus Speth holds a JD from the Yale Law School.

Jonathan Cohn

Managing Editor

Kathy Nguyen

Operations Manager

She holds a BS in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.