Environmental Truths about Food and Agriculture

Featuring Gidon Eshel

B.A., Haifa University, Israel; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Professor Gidon Eshel specializes in oceanography, climatology, and geophysics. He is the author of Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2011) and the forthcoming Agrophelia and Food Math: From Stellar Nucleosynthesis to Your Plate. Recent publications include an article on sustainable beef production for Nature, Ecology, and Evolution and an analysis on the climate impact of intensive vs. pastoral beef that was highlighted in Nature’s Research Highlights. His work has also appeared in Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, Environmental Science & Technology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Earth Interactions, and American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, among other publications. Selected talks and outreach activities include the keynote address at the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences' 45th annual meeting (July 2017); an invited contribution to the website of and appearance in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Before the Flood; appearances on WAMC Public Radio’s Earth Wise, coproduced by the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, and NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook (2015); and presentations at MIT Water Summit, University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment; Harvard University; Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Culinary Institute of America, among many others.

Recent honors include a Radcliffe Fellowship (2016–17) and PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellowship (2010–12). Eshel also serves as a senior research scientist for NorthWest Research Associates and as an independent consultant to environmentalCalculations.com, with his primary client the Hudson Valley Smart Energy Coalition. Previous positions include: Bard Center Fellow (2007–12); Senior Fellow, Center for Environmental Science, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (2002–07); principal investigator, Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science, University of Chicago (2001–03); and associate scientist of physical oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1998–99). Eshel was assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago (1999–2007) before joining the Bard faculty in 2008.