Guest Lecturers

For 35 years, John Cronin has dedicated his career to environment and innovation. For his accomplishments, Time magazine named him a “Hero for the Planet” and People magazine described him as “equal parts detective, scientist and public advocate.”

Cronin is Director and CEO of Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, which is developing real-time technologies and observatories for waterways around the world. He is also Senior Fellow in Environmental Affairs at Pace University where he is helping develop the next generation of environmental and economic policy for water.

Cronin has worked as an advocate, legislative and congressional aide, commercial fisherman, professor, author and filmmaker.  He is known internationally for his Hudson River work, for which the Wall Street Journal called him “a unique presence on America’s major waterways.” He served as Hudson Riverkeeper from 1983 – 2000, a position that has inspired a legacy of 200 Waterkeeper programs that fight pollution on six continents. 

Cronin co-authored The Riverkeepers with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published by Scribner with an introduction by former Vice President Al Gore.  He has written numerous articles, including for the Op Ed page of The New York Times. He wrote and co-produced the film The Last Rivermen, named an outstanding documentary by the Motion Picture Academy Foundation. His essay, “Where Human and Nature Meet,” is featured in the upcoming book, Oceans, which will be released on Earth Day by Public Affairs Books, and accompany the Disney and National Geographic motion picture Oceans.

Cronin has been the subject of three books and extensive major media print and broadcast news stories, documentaries and profiles. The Knight-Ridder newspapers praised him as a “hero in one of the great success stories of the modern environmental movement.”

Formerly professor of environmental studies at Bard College’s Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Kiviat has researched the habitats and populations of rare and common turtle species, and performed landscape-level management of animals with large area requirements. He has conducted studies of biota, communities, and ecosystems in tidal wetlands and other habitats of the Hudson River, and other northeastern estuaries. He spent 10 years researching biodiversity and its management in the urban landscape of the Hackensack Meadowlands, and researched the ecology and management of invasive plants, especially long-present species such as common reed, purple loosestrife, Japanese knotweed, and water chestnut, which have both positive and negative impacts on native biodiversity and environmental services.

Erik Kiviat has authored or coauthored 80 publications and 200 technical assistance reports on wetland ecology, rare species, conservation science, invasive plants, Hudson Valley natural history, and human ecology. He is author of The Northern Shawangunks: An Ecological Survey; Hudson River East Bank Natural Areas; and Hackensack Meadowlands, New Jersey, Biodiversity: A Review and Synthesis; and coauthor of Biodiversity Assessment Manual for the Hudson River Estuary Corridor.

After nearly 15 years reporting for The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin left the staff at the end of 2009 to become a senior fellow at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. He continues to write the Dot Earth blog, which has moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section.

He reported on the global environment in print and on Dot Earth. He has spent a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon and the troubled relationship of climate science and politics. He has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the Pole. He spearheaded a three-part Times series and one-hour documentary in 2005 on the transforming Arctic and another series, "The Climate Divide," on the uneven impacts of climate change.

He has written books on the Amazon rain forest, global warming and the once and future Arctic. Before joining The Times, Mr. Revkin was a senior editor of Discover, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and a senior writer at Science Digest. Mr. Revkin has a biology degree from Brown and a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia. He has taught at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy.

He lives in the Hudson River Valley with his wife and two sons. In spare moments, he is a performing songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who occasionally accompanies Pete Seeger at regional shows and plays in a folk-roots band, Uncle Wade.