Lucian Spataro

Lucian Spataro Jr. is an environmentalist, businessman, educator, and adventurer whose accomplishments are international in scope and local as well.

Dr. Spataro earned a B.S. from the University of Arizona and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from Ohio University. He has held engineering, management, and educational positions around the world.

While working as the Director of the Program on Sustainable Development at the University of Arizona’s International College, he was a pioneer for sustainability in the Arizona-Sonora region and authored numerous studies and grants in this same area of research. In recognition of his civic and business contributions, he was chosen by Site Selection Handbook as one of the “10 Outstanding Young Leaders of 1988,” and was nominated for a White House Fellowship in 1992.

In 1989 he embarked on his record-breaking ocean-to-ocean horseback journey to raise awareness of the need for rainforest protection. In October of 2011, an expanded and beautifully designed recounting of his historic adventure was published as The Long Ride: The Record-Setting Journey by Horse Across the American Landscape by Green Rider LLC. This book has already received two major awards: the 2012 IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Gold Award for the book “Most Likely to Save the Planet” and the Benjamin Franklin Bronze Award for Autobiography/Memoir and was an Award Finalist in Nature, Environment and Travel Essays for the 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year.

He has also been very involved in community-based education endeavors and worked with Bazy Tankersley (whose horses he rode in his epic journey) and her son Mark Miller to start up the Black Stallion Literacy Project (BSLP) in Arizona. Spataro has continued with his equestrian and environmental interests and is active in preservation projects in the McDowell Mountain Park and with the Sonoran Institute and their environmental restoration efforts in the Colorado River delta.

Spataro is currently President and CEO of the Joe Foss Institute and continues to write and speak on environmental topics and sustainability to audiences from K-12 to college and to civic, business, and environmental groups. He calls Scottsdale (AZ) home, where he lives in the shadow of the McDowell Mountains with his wife Lori, daughter Lauren, and their black lab Dallas and endurance horse Masquerade.