PETER A. VICTOR

Peter A. Victor B.Soc.Sc., Ph.D., FRSC

Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, York University, Canada

Email: peter@pvictor.com

 

Peter Victor has worked as an economist on environmental and energy issues for over 50 years as an academic, public servant, and private consultant. He first became interested in the links between the economy and the environment in the 1960s. In his doctoral dissertation and first book Pollution: Economy and Environment (1972), he applied the physical law of the conservation of matter to the empirical analysis of a national economy (Canada). Peter was the first economist to estimate the material flows embedded in consumption expenditures using environmentally extended input-output analysis.

 

Peter received formal training in economics from excellent teachers at Harrow County Boys’ School (UK), the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of British Columbia (Canada). Inspired by economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, E.J. Mishan, Kenneth Boulding, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Herman Daly and Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, Peter became increasingly disturbed by the shortcomings of neo-classical economics with its undue reliance on the concept of 'externalities' for addressing environmental issues. Instead, he preferred to view the economy as a sub-system of the environment, fully dependent on it for all materials and energy and for disposing of all its wastes - the core idea of what became known as ecological economics.

 

From 1970 to 1973 Peter taught economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK). He then moved to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment as its first economist. A study on the Ontario Pulp and Paper Industry in 1976 which he co-authored, continues to attract interest. From 1977 to 1991 Peter worked as a private consultant establishing Victor and Burrell Research and Consulting in 1979 and then VHB Consulting in 1987 where he led many influential projects. From 1985-87 he was Renewable Energy Advisor in the Kenyan Ministry of Energy and worked closely with several national and international NGOs on biomass energy and conservation.

 

In 1991 Peter rejoined the Ontario Ministry of the Environment as Assistant Deputy Minister of the new Policy Division and then the Environmental Sciences and Standards Division. He was responsible for several initiatives including Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights and the Municipal and Industrial Strategy for Abatement. Having remained active in university teaching and research throughout the years Peter was appointed Dean and Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto in 1996. He resumed his full-time career as an academic in 2001 with an extensive program of teaching, supervision and research.

 

Peter retired in 2017, but he continues to supervise and advise graduate students and maintains an active program of research and writing. He is Project Director of the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab funded for seven years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Within this framework, Peter, in collaboration with colleagues and students in several countries, continues to work on simulating alternative futures for advanced economies that will bring them into balance with the environment and improve well-being for all. He is also a co-investigator of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (UK).

 

Peter's path-breaking book, Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster (2008) in which he first explored these ideas, attracted national and international attention from the media, researchers, activists, and politicians. During his long career Peter has published numerous academic papers, professional reports and books. Between 2018 and 2023 he wrote a second edition of Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster (2019), Herman Daly's Economics for a Full World. His Life and Ideas (2022), and Escape from Overshoot. Economics for a Planet in Peril (2023).

 

Over the years Peter has served on many boards and committees and advised public, private and non-governmental organizations on a wide range of economic and environmental issues. He was the founding president of the Canadian Society of Ecological Economics and President of the Royal Canadian Institute for Science. He is a member of the Board of the Footprint Data Foundation and the Honorary Board of the David Suzuki Foundation. His work on ecological economics has been recognized through the award of the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences by the Canada Council for the Arts in 2011, the Boulding Memorial Prize from the International Society for Ecological Economics in 2014, and election to the Royal Society of Canada in 2015.