Elliott A. Norse is Founder and Chief Scientist of Marine Conservation Institute (MCI) in Bellevue, Washington, USA. After deciding to become an “ichthyologist” at age 5, he earned his B.S. with honors in biology, geology and music from Brooklyn College in 1969.
He examined the ecology of blue crabs in the Caribbean and Tropical East Pacific for his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California and his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Iowa.
Since 1978, he’s worked to catalyze fundamental change in environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency, at the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (where, in 1980, he wrote the chapter that defined biological diversity as conservation’s overarching goal), the Ecological Society of America, The Wilderness Society and The Ocean Conservancy, before founding MCBI in 1996.
MCBI is a national and international science and conservation advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the new science of marine conservation biology and applying ecosystem-based management to issues including ocean zoning, marine reserves, destructive fishing methods and other ways to protect, recover and sustainably use the sea.
A Founding Life Member of the Society for Conservation Biology, Norse organized the first and second Symposia on Marine Conservation Biology (in Victoria BC in 1997 and San Francisco in 2001, respectively). He has also organized numerous scientific workshops on emerging marine environmental issues as well as the symposium Marine Ecosystem-based Management: Lessons from the Land at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
His 140+ publications include four books: Conserving Biological Diversity in Our National Forests (1986), Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (1990), Global Marine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for Building Conservation into Decision Making (1993) and Marine Conservation Biology: The Science of Maintaining the Sea’s Biodiversity (2005).
Norse is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation and received the Evergreen Award for service to the State of Washington and NOAA’s Nancy Foster Award for Habitat Conservation. |