Eric Chivian

Eric Chivian M.D. Director The Program for Preserving the Natural World, Inc. Associate Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Harvard University Dr. Eric Chivian is the Founder and former Director (for 16 and ½ years) of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, and former Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, both at Harvard Medical School. The Center is now based at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1980, he founded (with Professors Bernard Lown, Herbert Abrams, and James Muller) International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. During the past 25 years, he has worked to involve physicians in the United States and abroad in efforts to protect the environment, and to increase public understanding of the potential human health consequences of global environmental change. He was senior editor and author of MIT Press’ Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment. The book, published in 1993, the first on the subject for a general audience, has been used as a text at several medical schools, schools of public health, and universities in the United States and abroad. Editions have been published in German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Persian. This was Dr. Chivian’s 2nd book—his first, for which he was senior editor and author, was Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War, published by W.H. Freeman and Company (Scientific American) in 1982, which also appeared in German, Italian, and Japanese editions. Both books won several awards. In 1996, Dr. Chivian founded and became director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, the first center at a medical school in the United States focusing on the human health dimensions of global environmental change. The Center (designated an official “Collaborating Center” of the United Nations Environment Programme) developed and directed the Harvard Medical School course “Human Health and Global Environmental Change” for a decade (which was disseminated to thousands of students at 65 other medical schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. and abroad), held 23 Congressional Briefings, and taught an intensive annual course on the environment and health for the U.S. Congress for 10 consecutive years. Dr. Chivian is the editor and lead author, with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, of the critically-acclaimed book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, published in June, 2008 by Oxford University Press and co-sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the U.N.'s Convention on Biological Diversity, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The book, launched at U.N. headquarters and at the Smithsonian Institution, is the most comprehensive report available on the relationship of human health to the health of the living world. It was named “Best Biology Book of 2008” by the Library Journal, along with Bert Hölldobler’s and Edward O. Wilson’s book The Superorganism, and was said by Professor Wilson (who wrote the Foreword) to be “a masterpiece,” by former Vice President Al Gore to be “the most complete and powerful argument I have seen for the importance of preserving biodiversity”, and by Professor Donald Kennedy, former President of Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine, to be “the best work ever on what biodiversity means to human health.” Now in its 5th printing, it is has been published in a Spanish (Preservar la Vida by Fondo de Cultura Economica), and an Arabic edition (by King Saud University) and will be coming out in Chinese and Japanese this coming year. In 2008, Dr. Chivian was named by Time Magazine, along with the Rev. Richard Cizik, Former Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” for their work in organizing scientists and Evangelicals to join together in efforts to protect the global environment. Dr. Chivian has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad, including giving the famous Darwin Lecture at the London Zoological Society in 2005, at hundreds of venues, to tens of thousands of people, and has appeared on national television and radio and in the print media in numerous countries. He has over 100 publications, including 32 published letters in The New York Times. Dr. Chivian run Pairidaeza Farm, a small orchard he planted in central Massachusetts growing heirloom apples, peaches, pears, Asian pears, plums, apricots, and grapes as organically as he can. He is currently an Associate of the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University; and is directing a new non-profit called The Program for Preserving the Natural World, Inc. (PPNW). At PPNW, he is working with a team of other physicians, public health experts, and scientists, almost all from academia, on: climate change with His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales and his International Sustainability Unit, and with the Vatican; on promoting a wider understanding of the human health and environmental threats from using systemic pesticides in agriculture (especially for Genetically Modified crops); and on Nature’s Toolkit: Engineering Secrets for Sustainable Design, a project that will produce an enhanced electronic book, a S.T.E.M. curriculum for high schools and colleges, and a museum exhibit. Nature’s Toolkit will make a strong argument for the conservation of the living world, not only because it provides the goods and services that make us healthy and keep us alive, but because it contains the most perfect engineering designs, designs that may be found in a single species, and in that species alone. When that plant or animal or microbe goes extinct, it may take with it an engineering secret that has been perfected by countless trial and error experiments, over thousands, and perhaps over millions of years, a vital secret that we may need to understand in order to lead more energy-efficient, more sustainable lives, a secret that could be lost forever.