John Berger (author)

In 1966, John J. Berger earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University.[1] Prior to his work on energy and the environment, Berger was an innovator in journalism. In 1970, he co-founded Alternative Features Service, Inc. to support the development of alternative and college newspapers and radio stations in the U.S. with syndicated press materials that especially highlighted the creation of alternative institutions, such as free clinics, people's banks, free universities, and alternative housing. In 1976, after publishing his first book, Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option, with introduction by Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling and a foreword by Senator Mike Gravel, he was invited by David Brower to become Friends of the Earth's Energy Projects Director in San Francisco.:[1] Just a few years later, in 1979, he became a technical editor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.[1] The next year, Berger was awarded an MA in Energy and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.[1] In 1980 and 1981, Berger taught courses in energy technology and policy at Vista College and the University of San Francisco. In 1984, Berger began two years of postgraduate research on land-use policy in Sacramento at the University of California, Davis.[1] In 1985, he published Restoring the Earth: How Americans Are Working to Restore Our Damaged Environment and became the executive director of Restoring the Earth, an environmental organization based in Berkeley, California.[1] Berger then went on to receive a PhD in Ecology from the University of California, Davis in 1990[1] and served as visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Policy at the Graduate School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland[6] and Professor of Environmental Science at the University of San Francisco.[2] His awards include: a Switzer Foundation Environmental Fellowship for graduate study, a year-long fellowship for study at the University of Tunis in Tunisia, a summer writing fellowship at the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks; and selection to participate in a summer-study program at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory for Genetic Research. Berger is also an independent energy and environmental consultant. He is currently (2016) an Affiliated Research Fellow at UC Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.