Center Director John Holdren Featured Essayist in January 2008 Issue of SCIENCE

January 25, 2008

WHRC Director, John P. Holdren

See full text of the essay at SCIENCE »

John P. Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Center, is the featured essayist in the January 25th issue of SCIENCE. The essay, entitled "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being" is drawn from Dr. Holdren's AAAS Presidential Lecture from last February's annual meeting.

The essay focuses on the status and prospects of five specific sustainable-well-being challenges for which the science-and-technology component is particularly important:  (1) meeting the basic needs of the poor; (2) managing the competition for the land, water, and terrestrial biota of the planet; (3) maintaining the integrity of the oceans; (4) mastering the energy-economy-environment dilemma; and (5) moving toward a nuclear weapon–free world. The Woods Hole Research Center focuses on issues encompassed in areas 1, 2, and 3.

In addition to his role with the Center, Dr. Holdren is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.  He is also a professor in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, immediate past president and current chair of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Co-Chair of the independent, bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy.  His research and engagement with policy have focused on causes and consequences of global environmental change, energy technology and policy, sustainable development, and nuclear nonproliferation and arms control.   Trained in space science and plasma physics at MIT and Stanford, Dr. Holdren co-founded in 1973 and co-led until 1996 the interdisciplinary graduate program in Energy and Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1987 to 1997 he served as chair of the executive committee of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and in 1995 he delivered the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Pugwash organization. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

The AAAS is the largest general-science society in the world.  The Association’s journal, SCIENCE, is the most widely read and most influential general-science journal in the world.

The lecture by the AAAS President, from which this essay is derived, launches the annual meeting and elaborates the meeting’s theme, which it is the privilege of each year’s President to choose.   Last year’s annual meeting in San Francisco, on Dr. Holdren’s chosen theme of  “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being”, attracted 10,000 participants. The video and PowerPoint from the Presidential Lecture and other plenary lectures from that meeting may be viewed at the AAAS website.

The Woods Hole Research Center is dedicated to science, education and public policy for a habitable Earth, seeking to conserve and sustain forests, soils, water, and energy by demonstrating their value to human health and economic prosperity. The Center has initiatives in the Amazon, the Arctic, Africa, Russia, Asia, Boreal North America, the Mid-Atlantic, and New England including Cape Cod. Center programs focus on the global carbon cycle, forest function, landcover/land use, water cycles and chemicals in the environment, science in public affairs, and education, providing primary data and enabling better appraisals of the trends in forests.