Flourishing Forever
John R. Ehrenfeld is Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. He retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program.He has been thinking about sustainability for a long time. "In 1967," he says, "I founded a research company called Walden Research, a good name for someone in the greater Boston area, to do air pollution research. And it was one of the handful, literally, four or five companies at that time devoted to studying the environment. I stayed there for a while and in 1978 I was appointed by President Carter to run a small resource agency here in New England called the New England River Basins Commission. I ran that until Reagan took office and abolished the agency. I've been the executive director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology since it was started in 2001. And then in-between I found time to do some lecturing, a little teaching, but primarily I spent the last five years, in putting a book together, my book, Sustainability by Design." Ehrenfeld spoke with Michael S. Hopkins, Editor-in-Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review.