Jesse Huntley Ausubel

Jesse Huntley Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University, has aimed for four decades to elaborate the vision of a large, prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature.  His work has spanned energy and materials, forests and farms, marine life, human population, and climate as well as engineering, earth, life, and social sciences.  Among concepts with which he is closely associated are dematerialization, decarbonization, industrial ecology, and land-sparing.  Anchoring the work is analysis of time-series data using models of growth and diffusion, often applied to evolution of technology. Ausubel was a main organizer of the first UN World Climate Conference in 1979.  He has helped design and conduct major international research programs, including the World Climate Program, International Geosphere-Biosphere (Global Change) Program, Census of Marine Life, Barcode of Life initiative, Encyclopedia of Life, Deep Carbon Observatory, and International Quiet Ocean Experiment.  Long associated with the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mr. Ausubel received honorary doctorates from Dalhousie and St. Andrews universities.  Awards include the International Cosmos Prize, National Ocean Champion Award, Blue Frontier Prize, Breakthrough Institute Paradigm Prize and honorary fellowship in the American Geographical Society. A deepwater lobster, Dinochelus Ausubeli, is named in his honor.