Jerry Mander

Jerry Mander founded and served as the former director, and distinguished fellow of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a San Francisco “think tank” focused since 1994 on exposing the negative impacts of economic globalization, and the need for economic transitions toward sustainable local economies. He was also program director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology.  IFG has been widely credited as the principal organizer of the immense protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, 1999, closing down the Doha round.

Mander was trained as an economist in the 1950s (Columbia University), but his early career was as president of a major commercial ad agency, Freeman, Mander & Gossage, and then as founder of the country’s first nonprofit ad agency in 1971, Public Media Center, which ran advertising and publicity campaigns for Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and various indigenous and antiwar groups. These campaigns included the celebrated Sierra Club campaigns (with David Brower) that kept dams out of the Grand Canyon, established a Redwood National Park, and stopped production of the Supersonic Transport (SST).

Mander’s most recent book (2012) is The Capitalism Papers; Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System. Prior books include international best-sellers Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and In the Absence of the Sacred, both critiques of the growing negative power of technological systems.  Other books include The Case Against the Global Economy (with Edward Goldsmith), Alternatives to Economic Globalization (with John Cavanagh), Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization (with Victoria Tauli-Corpuz) and The Superferry Chronicles (with Koohan Paik.)

Mander has been called “the patriarch of the anti-globalization movement” (New York Times, 2007).  He was cited among “The 100 Leading Visionaries of the 20th century” by Resurgence Magazine.