I am an economist and I have worked on environmental issues for 40 years as an academic, public servant and consultant. I became interested in the links between the economy and the environment in the 1960s. In my doctoral dissertation and first book (Pollution: Economy and Environment) I applied the physical law of the conservation of matter to the empirical analysis of a national economy (Canada) using an extended version of input-output analysis. I believe I was the first economist to do this.

I received formal training in economics from excellent teachers at the University of Birmingham (U.K.) and the University of British Columbia. Those who influenced me most were Colin Harbury, Anthony Scott, John Helliwell and Gideon Rosenbluth.  I became increasingly interested in the shortcomings of neo-classical economics and capitalism, especially in relation to the connection between the economy and the environment. Economists of greatest influence were: John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Herman Daly, and Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen. 

Now I am a Professor in Environmental Studies at York University where I teach an undergraduate course in environmental management and graduate and undergraduate courses in ecological and environmental economics. From 1996 to 2001 I was Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies. This followed several years as Assistant Deputy Minister of the Environmental Sciences and Standards Division in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Prior to that I was a principal of VHB Consulting and Victor and Burrell Research and Consulting where I undertook numerous influential policy-related economic studies in Canada and abroad. I continue to provide technical advice to public, private and non-governmental organizations on areas as air pollution and health, emissions trading, emerging issues, energy, and full cost accounting at the national and corporate levels.

I have served on many boards and commissions. Currently I am a member of the Advisory Council of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science, Canada’s oldest science organization having served as its President from 2000 to 2004. I was the founding President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics and I am and have been a member of many boards and committees including currently the Ontario Government’s Advisory Committee on Transboundary Science, the Advisory Panel of TruCost, the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Advisory Committee on the National Accounts for Statistics Canada.

These days I consider myself an ecological economist, identifying with many others who have come to understand economies as subsystems of the biosphere. My current research is an inquiry into managing without growth, utilizing LOWGROW, a systems model of the Canadian economy for exploring the interplay of growth, employment, poverty and the environment. I have published several papers on managing without growth with my former professor Gideon Rosenbluth. My book Managing without growth: smaller by design, not disaster’ was published in 2008 by Edward Elgar Publishing. I am also a member of a SSHRC funded team working on a 3 year project on The Ethical Foundations of Ecological Economics and the Tools for Its Assessment.