About

Michael (Mickey) Glantz created the Fragilecologies website as a service for those interested in climate-society-environment interactions.

Michael Glantz is the Director of the Consortium for Capacity Building housed in the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is a social scientist (Political Science PhD from the University of Pennsylvania) and was NCAR’s only senior social scientist in its 50 year history.

Before studying the interactions between climate and society (droughts, famines, freezes) and their impacts on political systems and on economies, he was a Metallurgical Engineer. With a Master’s degree in Political Science (International Relations)  in 1963, he studied (and visited) violent political revolutions in Portuguese,  Africa.  After a few years in industry in the mid-sixties, Mickey returned to the University of Pennsylvania to earn a PhD in Political Science in August 1970.  He taught for a few years before going into research on climate related issues in 1974.

In the early 1970s he was drawn to the West African Sahel as a result of devastating drought and famine in that region and in Ethiopia. At that time he was selected as a postdoctoral fellow to NCAR’s Advanced Study Program and worked for NCAR’s founder and former director, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, on a project to assess the value of a long-range climate forecast for agriculture and range management in West Africa and for agriculture in the Canadian Prairie Provinces. This study led him to inquire about the value of forecasts of a little known (at that time in the mid-1970s) phenomenon known as El Niño. This was one of the first studies of the societal impacts of El Niño.

Glantz wrote a bi-weekly column for the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado) for six years (the Environmental Minute) and for the Daily Planet for a couple of years (The Last Flight Out). He created the Fragilecologies website in order to write articles for those who use the Internet in search of information on topics related to climate-society-environment interactions. Other topics are also addressed under a section called “Up close and personal.”

If so desired, you can contact Michael (Mickey) Glantz (mickeyglantz AT hotmail.com) at CCB or visit his home page on the CCB site at the University of Colorado.

The links below take you to some of Mickey’s most recent endeavors and to two quarterly newsletters that were edited by Mickey (the Network Newsletter and the ENSO Signal). These newsletters are currently archived and no longer updated.

Note: The views expressed on this website are those of the editor and in no way reflect the views of the University of Colorado or any other organization or individual, except for the editorials of the guest editors.