Andrew Perlstein

Andrew Perlstein began acting on his concern for the environment as a high school student in New York City. As president of his ninth grade class, he made it a class project to organize the school’s Earth Day events. Over the following two years he served as president of the student environmental club, and his efforts brought in guest speakers from Environmental Defense and the New York Botanical Garden. He published 14 opinion pieces on the environment in the student weekly newspaper, of which he later became editor-in-chief. The school faculty highlighted this writing when they presented Andrew with the Dartmouth Book Club Award, foreshadowing his next stop in life; he arrived at Dartmouth College in 1996 intent on getting the academic background for a career dedicated to the environment.

Andrew double-majored in Earth Sciences and Asian Studies, convinced that knowledge of a foreign language and culture, scientific literacy and appreciation for the scientific method are crucial for dealing with today’s environmental problems. During terms away from campus Andrew did internships at the Council on Environmental Quality in the White House and National Public Radio’s China bureau in Beijing. On campus, he served as Sports Director for Dartmouth’s AM and FM radio stations and as play-by-play commentator for live broadcasts of varsity hockey games, work for which he received awards for creative production and achievement in broadcast journalism.

After graduation, Andrew returned to China for ten months to assist a team of consultants from the World Tourism Organization in formulating a tourism development plan for the provincial government of Yunnan. This project provided inspiration for his Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to continue his studies of China. A committee of professors at Wisconsin supported Andrew’s most recent trip to Yunnan to conduct preliminary research on conservation efforts in the mountainous region between the Upper Mekong and Yangtze Rivers. Reading one day in the New York Public Library, he came across these words by C.P. Fitzgerald, describing this part of Yunnan in 1941: “Here one is on the edge of two worlds. Here the immense, integrated and age-old city and village culture of China meets and yields to the tent-dwelling nomads of the high grassland plateaux of Tibet.” As a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellow at Stanford, Andrew is interested in doing research on the changing boundary between urban and rural places and what it means for our environmental future. As discussions about conservation and sustainability increasingly demand consideration of the role of cities and the impact of urbanization, IPER is an ideal place for him to explore the these issues through a combination of disciplinary perspectives.