Kates, Robert (1929–)

Robert (Bob) W. Kates is one of the world's leading geographers of the past half-century. He has said that from the beginning, his grand query was “What is and ought to be the human use of the Earth?” Since 1958, Kates has focused on three main issues: (1) living with hazard, (2) ending hunger, and (3) sustaining life on Earth. He has played a major role in the development of sustainability as a transdiscipline.

Kates was born in New York City in 1929. In his late 20s, he was supporting a young family by working in industry in the Chicago area, having left college without a degree to get married, when he signed up for a night course at a local university that was taught by one of Gilbert White's graduate students at the University of Chicago. A year later, he was admitted to graduate school in geography at Chicago. Kates began his graduate study in 1958 in an interdisciplinary effort to understand floodplain management. He became geography's most vivid example of the value of second chances. Not since Gilbert White, who became his mentor, has there been a geographer who has so notably shaped research on nature-society relationships. Most of his career was spent as a geography professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In considering how societies and individuals assess and respond to environmental and other hazards, Kates has led the way in introducing risk assessment perspectives and paying attention to how local rationalities may differ from those of external analysts, both in the United States and in developing countries. His insights about ending hunger have been developed from his experience with hazard modeling, looking into what factors lead to inadequate food supplies and the ways in which that knowledge can be combined with action to reduce hunger.

Since he published a classic paper on sustaining life on Earth in Scientific American in 1994, Kates has been a driving force behind the emergence of sustainability science as a new transdiscipline. He coled the preparation of a U.S. National Research Council report (1999) that broke new ground in identifying the challenges both to science and to converting science into action, as did a 2001 paper in Science that established a new quasi discipline of sustainability science for research and practice.

Kates's work has earned him major recognition, unmatched by any other geographer in his generation. In 1975, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; in 1981, he was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship; and in 1991, he was awarded the President's National Medal of Science in a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C. Even so, Kates has, in many cases, taken a path different from that of conventional geographical scholarship. From the beginning, he showed an interest in questions that mattered as much to society as to science. Perhaps influenced by his early immersion in group research, he has actively sought challenges that are too large for any one individual.

Since receiving his PhD in 1962, he has thrown himself into not only contributing to science but [Page 1655]also making his local area better, as he now does in Maine. He shows every day how much he cares about a host of colleagues, collaborators, and former students; and he has no priority higher than his family—his wife, three children, and six grandchildren. It is no accident that he formulated what might be called “the Kates discount rate”—the discount rate applied by grandparents to future benefits for their grandchildren, for whom those future benefits have a higher value than the current costs.

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