Ed Ayres

Who is Ed Ayres?

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.

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.