Education
After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 1994.
( Our dominant culture continues to celebrate blind econo...)
Our dominant culture continues to celebrate blind economic expansion despite its heavy toll on people and nature all over the globe. In fact, our national income accounts (such as the GDP) and our policies ignore that much of today's economic income stems from liquidating our social and natural assets. While living on the planet's capital, rather than on the interest (or sustainable harvest) of its renewable assets, we operate as if we could transgress ecological limits forever. Rather than acknowledging this ecological reality, we actively resist recognizing biophysical limits and use wealth to temporarily shield ourselves from the fallout of ecological overshoot. This study addresses the core question of sustainability and shows why nations will also secure their future competitiveness if they improve their ecological performance. Taken together, all the countries studied consume approximately one-third more ecological services than their available ecological capacity can provide, suggesting that the global economy as a whole is poorly positioned for future competition. Still we find that the European countries, Japan , and Canada (this last because of its large ecological remainder) are in distinctly more favorable starting positions for future competitiveness than all the other countries. They are better at using fewer resources to produce commodities, and, in the case of the countries with ecological remainders, they take better care of their existing ecological capacities. Perhaps the most significantcant finding is that 16 of the 20 eco-efficiency leaders (about 80 percent) are competitive, compared to only 11 of the 24 eco-efficiency laggards (about 45 percent). This suggests either that eco-efficiency already offers a competitive edge or that competitiveness and high eco-efficiency are not mutually exclusive.
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professor President of Global Footprint Network
After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 1994.
He is President of Global Footprint Network, an international sustainability think tank with offices in Oakland, California. Brussels, Belgium, and Geneva, Switzerland. The think-tank is a non-profit that focuses on developing and promoting metrics for sustainability.
There, as his doctoral dissertation under Professor William Rees, he created with Professor Rees the ecological footprint concept and developed the methodology.
He has worked on sustainability issues for organizations in Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia and Australia. Wackernagel previously served as the director of the Sustainability Program at Redefining Progress in Oakland, California (1999 - 2003), and directed the Centre for Sustainability Studies / Centro de Estudios para la Sustentabilidad in Mexico (1995-2001).
In 2004, he was also an adjunct faculty at SAGE of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010, he was appointed Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1 July 2011 – 30 June 2013).
Wackernagel has said that "Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet"s ecological assets.".
( Our dominant culture continues to celebrate blind econo...)