Profile of Jerry Mander

Jerry Mander is one of globalization's strongest critics and a longtime social activist and best-selling author. Mander is Founder and co-director of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a senior fellow at the nonprofit Public Media Center, and a program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

In the 1960s, Mander was president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage, a San Francisco advertising company. In 1971, he formed the country's first non-profit advertising agency, Public Interest Communications, which worked for environmental, community and social action groups. Mander authored the successful Sierra Club campaigns to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon; establish Redwood National Park; and stop production of the Supersonic Transport (SST).

As founder and co-director of the IFG, an alliance of activists, scholars, and economists, Mander and his colleagues worry that the world's corporate and political leadership are in the process of restructuring global politics and economics in ways that could prove as profound as the Industrial Revolution. IFG is concerned that the rapid speed of the restructuring, as well as the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding it, are undermining democracy, human welfare, local economies, and the natural worlds.

Mander is author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, a serious indictment of the medium in which he reveals how television networks and advertisers exploit the medium for sales and how the contents of the images affect the human mind and body. Mander has also authored In the Absence of the Sacred and with Edward Goldsmith, co-edited The Case Against the Global Economy. Mander holds a graduate degree from Columbia University's Business School in international economics.

Photograph, Courtesy of Mikkel Aaland

• Weblinks
• The International Forum on Globalization
• Public Media Center
• The Foundation for Deep Ecology
• Audio Interview, Scott London
• Review, "In the Absence of the Scared", Scott London
• Review of Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television", Turn off your Tv