Erik Kiviat Receives Great Work Award in Honor of Thomas Berry

Fall 2014—This award is bestowed annually by the Environmental Consortium of Colleges & Universities to individuals in higher education whose work exemplifies Thomas Berry’s counsel that colleges and universities should “reorient the human community toward a greater awareness that the human exists, survives, and becomes whole only within the single great community of planet earth.” Thomas Berry, 1914-2009, was a cultural historian, religious thinker, environmental philosopher, lecturer, and writer who taught at Seaton Hall, Fordham, and Columbia

In her statement the consortiums’s director Michelle Land noted that “though Erik Kiviat has spent his life, and forty-five year research career, in the epicenter of hard-edged environmental politics—the Hudson River Valley—his idealism about the role of science in our environmental future has never waned…. Dr. Kiviat is legendary amongst Hudson Valley scientists and environmentalists as the gold standard for ethical research and the pursuit of environmental truth. This year’s award not only recognizes his life’s work, it echoes his call that knowledge must be the basis for environmental decision-making.”