Jeremy
Rifkin was born in Denver, Colorado in January 1945, and was raised
in
southwest Chicago. He
holds an economics degree
from the Wharton School of Business, and a degree in international
affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
During
the 1960s and 1970s, Rifkin was active
in the peace movement. He helped organize the massive 1967 March
on the Pentagon, and two years later he co-founded the Citizens
Commission, a group devoted to publicizing alleged U.S. war crimes in
Vietnam. In 1970 Rifkin established
the People's
Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a
New
Left organization that preached hostility to corporations and
called for a second American Revolution, this one based on leftist
principles. In 1973, on
the 200th
anniversary of the Boston Tea Party,
Rifkin and PBC staged
a so-called Boston Oil Party, a huge demonstration whose purpose was, as Rifkin put
it, “to promote
radical change” by condemning big oil companies and their profits.
In
the late 1970s, Rifkin, with no formal training in the physical
sciences, began speaking
out against the fledgling biotechnology
industry, which he viewed as a manifestation of mankind's ill-advised
impulse to interfere with the workings of the natural world. Noting
Rifkin's “skillfully manipulated legal and bureaucratic procedures
to slow the pace of biotechnology,” National
Journal
named
him one of the 150 most influential people in shaping federal
government policy.
As
the seventies progressed, Rifkin
continued to burnish his credentials as the intellectual guru
of neo-Luddism,
the belief that modern
technology has a destructive impact on mankind's quality of life and
on the environment. To promote this worldview, Rifkin in 1977
established the
Foundation
on Economic Trends.
Since 2002, Rifkin has served as an
advisor
to
the European
Union. In
that capacity, he has been the chief architect
of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, a long-term “economic
sustainability” strategy to address issues of global economics,
energy security, and climate change. The latter of these, which
Rifkin attributes to
greenhouse-gas emissions produced by human industrial activity, “may
be the greatest
threat our species has ever faced,” he says. “The effects of
climate change are already eroding economies in many parts of the
world,” adds Rifkin, “as extreme weather events destroy
ecosystems and agricultural infrastructure.” |
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