Michael Norton-Griffiths

"I was born in Boston, MA, USA in 1941 and lived the first twenty or so years of my life in the USA, England, Germany, Portugal and Belgium. I was educated in the England and competed my B.A. (Zoology) and D. Phil (Ethology) at the University of Oxford. Since when I have been basically resident in Kenya with my wife Annie and our son Alastair."

"After completing my doctoral studies at Oxford I had the amazing good fortune to spend five years in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, where I designed and implemented the Serengeti Ecological Monitoring Programme. Moving on to Kenya I spent two years as an independent consultant before founding an environmental consulting group, EcoSystems Ltd. (ESL).

"At ESL we did all the usual stuff such as integrated land use surveys, environment monitoring and impact assessments, rural development, wildlife management, and natural resource databases; and we completed projects and consultancy work in 25 countries in eastern, western and southern Africa, the Middle East and South America.

"In 1987 I spent a year with the IUCN as Head of the Eastern Sahel Programme before moving to UNEP for four years to direct the GEMS/UNITAR Africa Programme. This programme supported environmental information networks throughout Africa and created national environment information centres.

"In 1992 I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Harvard Institute for International Development (part of the Kennedy School) as a Visiting Scientist to research issues of conservation policy. After that year I moved to the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) in the Department of Economics, University College, London, to pursue my research interests into the economics of resource conservation and the economic implications environmental policy.

"In 1996/97 I took a sabbatical, of a kind, on the Clipper '96 round the world yacht race - as a crewmember on board the winning yacht Ariel which made all the effort very worth while!

"Back now in Kenya I continue my research interests into issues of land use economics and the economic foundations of conservation and land use policy. " ideas


 * Lone Mountain Fellows 2007, Property and Environment Research Center