Bruce Rich

environmental lawyer, writer

Bruce Rich is an attorney who has published extensively on the environment in developing countries and development in general. He is the author of a major critique and history of the World Bank, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development, (Beacon Press) and was awarded the United Nations Global 500 Award for environmental achievement for his research and advocacy concerning multilateral development banks. He worked for two and a half decades as an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, and currently is advising the Sierra Club on a prospective program on international finance and climate. He has also worked for a variety of international agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Environment Program, the World Resources Institute, and the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the World Bank, and has testified in numerous Congressional hearings on U.S. participation in international financial institutions. He has written numerous articles and op-eds in publications such as *The Nation*, *The Financial Times*, *The Ecologist*, and *Environmental Forum*, the policy journal of the Environmental Law Institute in Washington. His most recent book is *To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India* (Beacon Press, April 2010), with a forward by Amartya Sen and an afterword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His professional focus on finance and ethics, as well as numerous visits to South Asia, helped inspire the writing of *To Uphold the World*. He is currently researching and writing a revised, updated, second edition of *Mortgaging the Earth*, to be published by Beacon Press in 2011. Rich is an honors graduate of Yale College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Photo courtesy of T. Charles Erickson.