This week’s podcast is the Posthumous interview with Eric Zencey. Eric was a professor, writer and social critic. He passed on July 1st, 2019.

Eric Zencey, novelist, essayist, lecturer, and social thinker was a tireless evangelist for a new way of thinking about humankind’s relationship with nature. Eric arrived in Vermont in 1980 to teach at Goddard College, quickly developing a deep love for his adopted state.

More recently, he served as a visiting lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as teaching in the Honors Program at the University of Vermont, where he also was a fellow at the Gund Institute. Over the years, Eric’s work was recognized and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bellagio-Rockefeller and Bogliasco Foundations. His commentaries appeared in several publications, including The New York Times, and he was quoted on National Public Radio and in the Harvard Business Review. He also helped convince Vermont leaders to adopt the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator), providing a more complete measure of a population’s well-being than the myopic GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

While his writing focused for the most part on the subject of ecological economic, he was also the author of the best-selling historical fiction novel "Panama", in which Henry Adams turns detective. In addition to "Panama", Eric published three works of non-fiction: "Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture"; "The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy"; and "Greening Vermont: The Search for a Sustainable State" (co-authored with Elizabeth Courtney). In addition to Goddard College, he taught in Empire State College’s International Program, which required frequent travel to its extension campuses in Prague and Albania. Here is a good link to Eric's books.

In the months before his death, he raised more than $100,000 to endow the Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics, to be administered by the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont. The prize recognizes the best current affairs book or long-form journalism that advances public understanding of real-world environmental challenges using the principles of ecological economics, a field that explores the relationships between economics and Earth’s limited natural resources. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics, through the University of Vermont Foundation, 411 Main St., Burlington, VT 05401.

Bordertown is an ecomedia project coming to you from the upper Winooski watershed in central Vermont. Our goal is to serve as an instrument for relationship building and communication, and to encourage the conversation around resiliency, equity and justice. Our intention is to celebrate life and community - and to help create conditions for all life to thrive.

Music for this Podcast – "The Great Divide" by Railroad Earth.

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