Joseph A. Tainter, Ph.D.

Dr. Joseph Tainter, a founding member of Sustainability International, LLC, received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1975. He worked on issues of sustainability before the term became common, including his groundbreaking and highly-acclaimed book The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988). He is the co-editor of The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (Columbia University Press, 2000). With T. F. H. Allen and Thomas Hoekstra he wrote Supply-Side Sustainability (Columbia University Press, 2003), the first approach to sustainability to integrate ecological and social science.

Dr. Tainter’s sustainability research has been used in more than 40 countries, and in many different scientific and applied fields. This work has been used by such prestigious international organizations as the United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Rand Corporation, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the Earth Policy Institute, and the Technology Transfer Institute/Vanguard. Dr. Tainter has been invited to present his research at such distinguished organizations as the Getty Research Center, the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

His research has been applied in economic development, health care, information technology, urban studies, and the challenges of security in response to terrorism. Dr. Tainter’s biography is included in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering. In addition to his work in Sustainability International, Dr. Tainter is Research Professor in the Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

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