Trained in political science and philosophy at Yale and Princeton Universities, after teaching for five years on the faculty of Richard Stockton College, I joined the staff of The Hastings Center in 1980 and developed my career in the interdisciplinary field of bioethics over the next 26 years. I have written and edited twenty seven books and have published approximately 200 articles on bioethics and public policy issues. In 2006 I joined the staff of the Center for Humans and Nature, which focuses on environmental ethics and policy. Overall, during the last decade my work has attempted to bridge the domains of bio-medical ethics, environmental ethics, and public health ethics.

For twelve years between 2000 and 2015 I served as an elected trustee of the Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY and worked on conservation and sustainability issues in the Hudson Valley.

Currently I am a Senior Fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature. I am also on the faculty of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the Yale University School of Public Health. Finally, I serve as a Fellow and Senior Advisor at The Hastings Center, where I worked from 1980-2006 and served as Executive Vice President from 1991 through 1999.

In 2011 I was named Editor-in-Chief of the new 4th edition of Bioethics (formerly the Encyclopedia of Bioethics) 6 vols. (Macmillan Reference, 2014), a standard reference work in the field of bioethics. Today, I am currently an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene 5 vols. (Elsevier, forthcoming 2017).

I have been active in the health policy and end of life care arenas and have published widely on ethical issues in hospital treatment decision making, palliative care, and hospice. I have served on the Board of Directors of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, and the Board of Trustees of the Hospice and Palliative Care Association of New York State. I was the co-founder of the “Decisions Near the End of Life” program, an educational and practice change program that was conducted in over 200 hospitals in 20 states from 1990-1996.

I have also been a leader in ethics research and education in the field of public health. From 2003-2009 I served as member and Chair of the Ethics Advisory Committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I am currently a member of a Task Force revising the public health code of ethics at the American Public Health Association. I am also the current chair of the Bioethics Advisory Committee of the March of Dimes.

My most recent book is Ecological Governance: Toward a New Social Contract with the Earth published by the West Virginia University Press in 2016. This book grew out of my work at the Center for Humans and Nature, where I have focused on environmental ethics and policy, with a special emphasis on ecological governance and ecological political economy. I am the editor of the Center’s electronic journal, Minding Nature, which began in 2008 and comes out three times per year.