Eric Zencey

Eric Zencey (born 1953) is an American author, and lecturer at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont and Washington University in St. Louis.

Zencey's Ph.D. dissertation, "Entropy as Root Metaphor," published at Claremont Graduate University in 1985, included a chapter calling for the development of a thermodynamically enlightened economics. He recycled some of the material there into some of the essays appearing in Virgin Forest.

Zencey currently teaches at the University of Vermont in the Honors College (HCOL) program, which offers students in the honors college program an opportunity to learn about the pursuit of knowledge. Zencey also teaches Architecture and Urban planning.

Zencey is contributing editor for North American Review, and has been a fellow of the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Bogliasco Foundations. Some of his work is available online, as at the History News Network, Stranded Wind, and European Tribune.

Since the recession, Zencey's ideas are receiving mainstream attention. On August 10, 2009, The New York Times published on page A17 an 1,800-word essay entitled "G.D.P. R.I.P.," in which Zencey argues that the G.D.P. is a flawed measure of societal and economic progress and should be abandoned as a primary benchmark. Zencey had a story in April 2009 in The New York Times about chemist-turned-economist Frederick Soddy, whose ideas were largely ignored when he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s but are now a foundation of ecological economics.

In Adbusters' September/October 2009 issue, Zencey's New York Times op-ed on Soddy is reprinted, and many similar ideas are discussed.

Zencey lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife, the novelist Kathryn Davis, his cat, Finny, and his Alaskan malamute, Lucy.

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