The Heinrich Böll Foundation North America will host Mr. Ralf Fücks, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, on a East Coast book tour of Green Growth Smart Growth – A New Approach to Economics, Innovation and the Environment during the week of April 13, 2015. On Monday, April 13, Mr. Fücks will speak at the Annual Conference of the BlueGreen Alliance in Washington, DC. He will then travel to the University of Virginia and Duke University, where he will give lectures on the importance of alternative smart growth strategies. The book tour will end with events in Charlotte, NC, and Pittsburgh, PA, in cooperation with the World Affairs Councils in Charlotte and Pittsburgh.
Green Growth Smart Growth addresses the realization that traditional growth strategies will only get us so far and explores subsequent new thinking about ways in which modern societies can deal with financial, climate, and resource scarcity issues. New energy technologies and financial innovation have opened up exciting new industrial and economic possibilities, and smart sustainable initiatives lead to job creation, innovation, and local, sustainable entrepreneurship. Mr. Fücks proposes an alternative way for societies to deal with these issues - a third way which combines ecological and economic components.
Biography:
Ralf Fücks is President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and has been a member of the executive board since 1996. The primary focus of his work is on sustainable development and a green economy, the future of European integration, and foreign policy. Within the Foundation, he is responsible for the divisions of Europe and North America, German-Israeli-Relations, and domestic political education.
Mr. Fücks joined the German Green Party in 1982. In 1985, he was elected to the Bremen State Parliament. He served as Co-President for the national Green Party in 1989/90. During this period, he strongly advocated transforming the Greens into a reform party which, jointly with the Social Democrats, should be striving for new political majorities and coalitions.
He returned to regional politics in Bremen in 1991, serving as Deputy Mayor and as Senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection until 1995.
As a member of the Green Party’s Program Commission, he co-authored the party program, which was adopted in spring 2002. In 2000, the Minister for the Interior, Otto Schily, appointed him a member of the non-partisan commission on migration, which presented its final report in July 2001.
Mr. Fücks holds degrees in social sciences, economics, and political science from the Universities of Heidelberg and Bremen.