York environmental studies Professor Peter Victor has been awarded the 2014 Kenneth Boulding Award for his influential research and for a long history of contributions to the field of ecological economics.
Peter Victor
The Kenneth Boulding Award committee of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) found Victor’s research on an ecological macroeconomics without growth particularly award worthy. The ISEE is a not-for-profit, member-governed, organization dedicated to advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people.
Victor first became interested in the links between the economy and the environment in the late 1960s. This was evident in his doctoral dissertation and first book – Pollution: Economy and Environment.
He trained as an economist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and the University of British Columbia. He was principal of VHB Consulting and Victor and Burrell Research and Consulting where he undertook several influential policy-related economic studies in Canada and abroad. He also worked as assistant deputy minister of the Environmental Sciences and Standards Division in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.
From 1996 to 2001, Victor was dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is a past president of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science and was the founding president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.
He calls himself “an ecological economist, identifying with many others who have come to understand economies as subsystems of the biosphere”.
He is the editor of The Costs of Economic Growth (Edward Elgar, 2013) and author of Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster (Edward Elgar, 2008).