Biography: Alon Tal

Professor Tal's career has been a balance between academia and public interest advocacy. He is on the faculty of at Ben Gurion University where is presently a visiting professor at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University and completing a book on Israeli overpopulation in . Prior to this he was a co-chairman of Israel’s .

Dr. Tal was the founding director of Adam Teva V'din, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense from 1990-1997, a leading public interest law group and was chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella group for eighty environmental organizations in Israel from 1998- 2003. He currently is a member of the international board of directors of the where he has served as chairman of the committee for land development that oversees forestry and land reclamation as well as the Committee for Sustainable Development. In 1996, Dr. Tal founded the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a graduate studies center in which Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian students join environmentalists from around the world in an advanced interdisciplinary research program.

Tal has held faculty appointments at Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities in Israel, and was a visiting professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Between 1990 and 1998 he was an adjunct faculty member at Harvard University. He has served as head of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. In 2006 he was awarded the Charles Bronfman humanitarian prize for environmental leadership. In 2008,in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary the Ministry of Environment granted him a life achievement award at age 48.

Dr. Tal has published over a hundred academic and popular articles as well as six books. His most recent book, All the Trees for the Forest – Israel’s Woodlands from the Bible to the Present, is to be come out this year from Yale University Press. l. Dr. Tal has received degrees in political science and economics from the University of North Carolina, Law from Hebrew University in . He completed his Masters and Doctoral degrees from the Harvard School of Public Health in Environmental Health Policy. Dr. Tal is married with three daughters and enjoys long distance running, tennis and playing bluegrass fiddle.