Eric Britton founded EcoPlan in 1966 to provide an independent international forum of observation, reflection and counsel on issues involving technological change as it effects people in their daily lives. This is the only job he has ever had. Over the years he has initiated, participated in, and carried to completion a fair range of international advisory assignments and research and demonstration projects aimed at providing decision counsel to government, business and the volunteer sector on thorny issues of technology, economy and society. A common theme in all this work is the need to gain a better understanding as a prerequisite to the strategic adaptation of technologies, products, services, business procedures, and institutional structures to changing technological, resource and environmental requirements.

In an attempt to advance the agenda of sustainable development, sustainable lives and social justice in very specific ways, he has spent a lot of time and effort in order to create a cycle of international problem-solving networks linking outstanding thinkers, researchers and decision-makers from diverse disciplines, countries and points of view. You can see some of the results of this open knowledge-building approach if you turn to the website of The Commons. In his attempt to get across the message of social responsibility, at a time in which other values often appear to be pushing it aside, he and his colleagues around the world have taken active roles in defining and supporting demonstration projects that show how new and more responsible forms of organization can be created in specific real world situations. One of the happy results of this work was when he and The Commons were awarded the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Prize for the Environment in June 2000 for the outstanding demonstration work carried out with the City of Bogota.

Britton has a couple of theories about doing better with our lives in this new century: one being that there are a lot of smart and capable people around who are well prepared to participate in governance, and most probably in entirely new ways. The second is that the so-called "Information Society" provides some of the means of this new era of knowledge building and governance. And the third is that people, you and I, are at heart profoundly inertial and as such largely unwilling to tread the icy waters of change. Unless, of course, we can put our toe in first and assure ourselves that it is not going to kill us. Thus, one of the main barriers to change is our collective inability to envisage, with confidence, a different and possibly better future. To this end, he has a long term interest in identifying, promoting and then as possible demonstrating what he calls "pattern breaks": means by which we may with a certain amount of comfort and confidence move to a rather different future - and, it is to be hoped, perhaps even one that is more just socially and more sustainable in every sense of that good word.

Eric did his undergraduate work in physical sciences at Amherst College and Columbia, was a Ph.D. Can. in the Graduate Faculty of Economics at Columbia University, worked on his dissertation as Fulbright Fellow in Italy, and has been a visiting lecturer at numerous US and European universities. He has written an unseemly number of articles, op-ed pieces, and reports of widely varying quality, as well as several books for adults, intellectuals and children. His 1994 book, Rethinking Work: New Concepts of Work in a Knowledge Society, originally published by the European Commission, Brussels in Nov. 1994, is slated to appear shortly in an expanded second edition. Another, entitled The Information Society and Sustainable Development, was eventually published both by the European Commission and as a special edition of the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice. (That said, he has some definite reservations about publication as a vehicle for advancing the sustainability agenda. All too often all, experience shows us, these books and reports, no matter how brilliant they may or may not be, serve only as "walls of words". Which suggests to him that they are a perhaps necessary but certainly not sufficient condition to lead the way in this muddled world of ours. We must learn and dare to do more and better.)

Personal notes:

• Born 27 June 1938 in USA
• US citizen, Resident of France
• Divorced (twice: excellent relations with both ex-wives)
• Health: Excellent. Work out and/or row 5 days/week.
• Interests: Active sports, chamber music, serious reading (ahem), history, community activism, maintaining friendshps, and children