Ed Ayres (environmentalist)

Ed Ayres is the founding editor and publisher of Running Times magazine and former editor of Worldwatch, a bimonthly global-trends magazine frequently quoted by textbooks and the mainstream news media. Ayres is also an ultramarathon runner, four-time national age-group champion, and former winner of the JFK 50-mile run.

In 1999, Ayres wrote God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future, a book that warns of four "spikes," out-of-control phenemona that threaten the biosphere. These include rising carbon gas emissions, the rate of biological extinctions, unsustainable consumption, and the exploding human population.

In 2010, he was co-author of Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil-Fuel Dependence to a Clean Energy Future (Prentice Hall).

Ayres considered the environmental movement to be mostly a failure, with the exception of some notable successes on issues such as ozone depletion. He retired from his position at the Worldwatch Institute in 2004, and later launched a website concerned with the sustainability of civilization in the coming decades, www.willhumansendure.com. In 2005, he and his wife, Sharon, moved from Northern Virginia to California, where they built an ecologically efficient house.

Selected bibliography

Books

• God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. 2000. ISBN 978-1-56858-174-3.
• The Longest Race: A Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance. New York: The Experiment. 2012. ISBN 978-1-61519-063-8.

Articles

• "Hidden Shame of the Global Industrial Economy", World Watch magazine (2004).

External links

• edayres.com