Wes Jackson
Wes Jackson (born 1936) co-founded the Land Institute with Dana Jackson. He is also a member of the World Future Council.
Wes Jackson
American
Pew Conservation Scholar (1990)
MacArthur Fellow (1992)
Right Livelihood Award (2000)
Early life and education[edit]
Jackson was born and raised on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. After earning a BA in biology from Kansas Wesleyan University, an MA in botany from the University of Kansas, and a PhD in genetics from North Carolina State University, Wes Jackson established and served as chair of one of the United States' first environmental studies programs at California State University, Sacramento.
Jackson then chose to leave academia, returning to his native Kansas, where he founded a non-profit organization, The Land Institute, in 1976. The Land Institute is working to develop perennial grains, pulses, and oilseed-bearing plants to be grown in ecologically intensified, diverse crop mixtures under its Natural Systems Agriculture program. In tandem with these sustainable agriculture efforts, the Ecosphere Studies program seeks to change the way people think about the world and their place in it, through educational and cultural projects with a perennial perspective. Jackson stepped down from the presidency of The Land Institute in 2016,[1] but still works in the Ecosphere Studies program.
Author[edit]
Wes Jackson is the author of several books and is recognized as a leader in the international sustainable agriculture movement. In 1971, Wes Jackson's first efforts to address growing environmental concerns, react to social concerns growing from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, and answer student requests for more relevant materials, resulted in the environmental reader, "Man and the Environment".[4][5] After leaving academia and establishing the Land Institute, Jackson published New Roots for Agriculture, partially in reaction to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office on soil erosion.[4][6]
This book expanded on ideas presented in a 1978 article, "Towards a Sustainable Agriculture," [4][7] about looking to natural ecosystems, such as the prairie, to help solve the problem of soil erosion. He collaborated with author Wendell Berry on "Meeting the Expectations of the Land," in response to a Council on Agricultural Science and Technology report on agrochemicals.[4][8]
Jackson's Becoming Native to This Place, published in 1994, challenges readers to develop a relationship with their ecosystems and further develops the idea of Natural Systems Agriculture. He was a 1990 Pew Conservation Scholar and in 1992 became a MacArthur Fellow.[9] In 2000, he received the Right Livelihood Award "for his single-minded commitment to developing an agriculture that is both highly productive and truly ecologically sustainable."[10] His work is often referred to by author Wendell Berry, with whom Jackson has shared a longtime friendship and correspondence.[11]
Selected Bibliography
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