Robert B. Gottlieb
Robert Bernard Gottlieb (born 1944) is an American academic, activist, journalist, and writer. From 1997 to 2015, he was the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College where he also served as co-founder and executive director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. He has written fourteen books on regional politics and economies, global cities, and environmental, food, and social justice topics. Biography Community engagement Gottlieb has long been engaged in social justice issues, including as an advocate of action research and community-engaged teaching. He co-founded the Pollution Prevention Education and Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1991 and subsequently organized the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) when he took his new position at Occidental in 1997. Through his research and teaching and through UEPI he helped supervise numerous projects at Occidental and UCLA that helped stimulate new and continuing social, environmental, and food justice movements and policy initiatives. These include the farm-to-school and farm to pre-school programs that are now available in all 50 states in the US, the development of Food Policy Councils, toxics reduction programs and policies, alternative transportation strategies and participation in innovative community and academic collaborations. Works Gottlieb's writings address critical social change issues including power, resistance, and the barriers and opportunities for social change. Thinking Big (1977) Gottlieb and Irene Wolt's book, Thinking Big: the Story of the Los Angeles Times, its Publishers and their Influence on Southern California, emerged from discussions in the early 1970s about the need for an alternative newspaper for Southern California whose primary source of news and opinion at that time was the Los Angeles Times. Carey McWilliams, called Thinking Big “a first-rate study.” Ben Bagdikian, the former National Editor of the Washington Post, characterized it as “a comprehensive and clear-eyed account of one of the most important newspapers in America [that represented] “a service to both the cause of better newspapers and to the citizenry at large.” Empires in the Sun (1985) and America’s Saints (1984) Gottlieb teamed up with Peter Wiley in the 1970s and 1980s to write about water, energy, land, and political issues in the Western US. They wrote many articles and a weekly column, Points West, that appeared in several dozen publications. Their first co-authored book, Empires in the Sun: the Rise of the New American West, profiled six western cities: Salt Lake, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. According to Joan Nice of High Country News, the book told of “how the West works, how its decisions are made, who pulls the strings and pockets the profits.” Expanding their research to include the politics and power of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which played an outsized role in Salt Lake, Phoenix, and Las Vegas led to their second book, America’s Saints: the Rise of Mormon Power, which provided an economic, political, and cultural profile of the church. A Life of its Own (1988) Actively engaged in