Dave Iverson

Social Scientist, Economist, Muckraker, and Environmental Activist

I am an economist who loves Nature. I have been working in forest management and public lands management all my adult life. For the past 29 years I worked for the US Forest Service (retired 11/30/07), dealing with land management and public policy played out at the confluence of complex, adaptive natural systems and complex, adaptive, and politically wicked social systems. Before that I did a short stint with Weyerhaeuser Corporation.

I am also an environmental activist. I am a founding board member for Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE). I played a minor role in the genesis of Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

I believe that we have for too long allowed development and commercial interests an upper hand in public lands policy and practice. The way forward to better balance is difficult, as has been the trek to date. But the prize of keeping our public lands primitive and close to nature is worth the fights.

Most of my bloging is about forest policy and management, but I also sometimes track Ecology and Economics. And I track geopolitics and international finance on my Economic Dreams... blog, in an attempt to learn from the complex and politically wicked interaction of actors and systems in that arena.

Lessons learned from any arena track well into the others. All are stages upon which cooperative and non-cooperative game theory are played. The games tend to look much more like Jumanji than either the "neoclassical economics" or the "operations research" theoretical backdrop I studied in graduate school in the ‘70s.