Leadership, Innovation, and Impact

YSE Celebrates 125 Years of Leadership, Innovation, and Impact

The Yale School of the Environment has been educating the next generation of environmental leaders and helping to meet some of society’s greatest challenges since 1900. Today, the community is working on climate solutions while looking at the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Steve Hamburg ’77 MFS, ’84 PhD applied to just one graduate school after earning a bachelor’s degree in ecology. He was drawn to the Yale School of the Environment because of its interdisciplinary and forward-looking, yet practical, approach to environmental science.

“It was the only program I applied to because of the level of innovation and systems thinking and the integration across disciplines that was taking place,” he said.

portrait of Steve Hamburg
Steve Hamburg ’77 MFS, ’84 PhD

Hamburg is now the senior vice president and chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and he says that when he glances around at today’s environmental leaders in public, private, and nonprofit organizations he sees old friends and classmates who are “having enormous impact in changing how we view the environment, in how we need to think about the environment to mitigate human impacts and address the climate crisis.”

Hamburg, himself, plays a critical role in the effort to reduce greenhouse emissions globally. He was integral to the development of MethaneSAT, the first-ever satellite sent into orbit by a nonprofit that detects and measures methane emissions from millions of sources around the world. Launched last March, MethaneSAT provides data that enables companies and policymakers to target reductions of this potent greenhouse gas with unprecedented precision.

Since its founding in 1900, more than 5,800 graduates of the school have taken on leadership roles in a wide array of sectors and disciplines, from shaping sustainable forestry to industrial ecology to ecosystem management and conservation. As YSE marks its 125th anniversary this year, it will commemorate the far-reaching impact its alumni, faculty, staff, and students have had and continue to have on every dimension of environmental science.

“From our founding in 1900 as The Yale Forest School to our present as the Yale School of the Environment, our strength is rooted in our interdisciplinary approach to developing solutions to meet some of society’s greatest global challenges and educating the next generation of environmental leaders,” said Indy Burke, the Carl Knobloch, Jr. Dean. “We are looking forward to celebrating 125 years of ‘leadership, innovation, and impact’ throughout the year, as well as looking at the many opportunities and challenges ahead.”

YSE will highlight the 125th Anniversary theme — Impact, Leadership, and Innovation — with a social media campaign featuring students and alumni; a photo essay in Canopy magazine; and at events and conferences throughout the year, including the International Society of Tropical Foresters Annual Conference; the Yale Forest Forum 2025 History of People and Forests speaker series; the New Horizons in Conservation Conference, and the Society of American Foresters National Convention (SAF), which is celebrating its 125th.

From our founding in 1900 as The Yale Forest School to our present as the Yale School of the Environment, our strength is rooted in our interdisciplinary approach to developing solutions to meet some of society’s greatest global challenges and educating the next generation of environmental leaders.”

Indy Burke Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean

It's not by chance SAF is also celebrating its 125th anniversary. It was founded by Gifford Pinchot, who established the Yale Forest School in 1900 with Henry S. Graves.

“The opening of the new School of Forestry took place yesterday in Professor Marsh’s former residence,” began the short announcement published in the Yale Daily News on September 29, 1900. Enrollment was small and students gathered on the first floor as Pinchot offered an address. Lectures began after the commencement ceremony. “Outdoor work” was to begin the following week.

In its first four decades, the Yale Forest School, as it was known, produced the first four leaders of the U.S. Forest Service, starting with Pinchot himself. Now the oldest continuous professional graduate forestry school in the U.S., YSE has been instrumental in shaping forestry practices around the world.

“The school literally founded and created the modern-day practice of forestry in the U.S., and, with it, the foundational knowledge for its practice over the centuries,” said Mark Ashton '85 MF, '90 PhD, senior associate dean of The Forest School and the Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology.

Research and practice across disciplines

The school’s focus has expanded dramatically over the decades, and, in 2020, the name of the school was changed from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies to the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) to better reflect the breadth of its environmental science research, practice, and scholarship.

Leadership, Innovation, and Impact

Yale School of the Environment at 125

Celebrate 125 years of the Yale School of the Environment with the latest updates and event listings!

With its science-to-solutions approach to environmental issues, YSE’s research informs a wide array of initiatives and policies on urban sustainability, clean energy, green chemistry, industrial ecology, ecology and ecosystem management, natural resource management, environmental economics, environmental justice, and climate change communication, among many other areas.

“So many of those who created America’s legal framework of pollution control in the latter decades of the 20th century had YSE connections, including Bill Reilly, Gus Speth, Frances Beinecke '71, '74 MFS, and Fred Krupp,” said Daniel Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy and director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “YSE continues to drive innovative policy ideas into our current political debates with the creative work of a number of professors.”

Esty’s work on sustainable trade and climate change is leaving its own legacy. While on public service leave, he worked with World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to map out how the global trade system can be reformed to help the world transition to a low-carbon future.

Paul Anastas, the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment, who is known as the “father of green chemistry,” has been advancing the field through the Yale Center for Green Chemistry & Engineering (CGCGE). The center is currently leading a new UNIDO initiative to reduce the use of hazardous chemicals worldwide with an accelerator program in six countries that promotes the transition to cleaner industrial practices in the textile and apparel industries.

Likewise, the Center for Industrial Ecology (CIE), directed by Marian Chertow ’81 MPPM, ‘00 PhD., professor of industrial ecology, has been a worldwide leader in reducing resource use and pollution through lifecycle assessments and industrial symbiosis, which allows manufacturers to utilize each other’s byproducts. CIE’s most recent advance on this front is a partnership between CIE and the World Bank that created a new global platform promoting opportunities for reuse of waste materials in industrial parks.

Yuan Yao, associate professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems, has continued this pioneering work with research focused on producing aviation fuel from municipal solid waste and reducing the carbon footprint of AI and computing by 45% within the next decade.

Centers and programs such as these, along with YSE’s joint degree programs, exemplify the school’s ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary thinking — the types of approaches that attracted students like EDF’s Hamburg decades ago and that are essential for tackling the complexity of today’s environmental crises.

Brad Gentry, the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Professor in the Practice of Forest Resources Management and Policy, noted the progress Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) has made in working with companies on environmental issues. CBEY has become a hub for YSE students pursuing a joint degree with the School of Management, the first joint degree program initiated at YSE.

“In the seventies, business was usually seen as the polluter, or the villain — and that was appropriate in some regards,” Gentry said.  “But, over time, the innovation side of business came to the fore. Yes, business is still a polluter, but it can also be an innovator and a partner.”

In recent years, YSE also has made substantial strides in building a strong environmental justice program. In 2024, Professors Dorceta Taylor '85 MFS,’91 PhD and Gerald Torres were honored with the first endowed chairs in environmental justice. Taylor was named the Wangari Maathai Professor of Environmental Justice, while Torres was named the Dolores Huerta and Wilma Mankiller Professor of Environmental Justice.

Satellite image of the New Haven area
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Taylor, who is director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Sustainability Initiative (JEDSI), pointed to YSE’s role in the early coming-together of the movement. “It trained me, for instance, and other people who earned doctorates in the field before it was known as environmental justice, and, then it was students like us who went out and built the field into what it is today,” she said.

Expanding access to education and training 

More than 1,000 professionals working across the globe have participated in YSE’s growing portfolio of online certificate programs. These programs include the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy, offered through CBEY, and Tropical Forest Landscapes, offered through the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI), which were both launched in 2019 and are hailed as models for equipping participants with knowledge that they can put into practice almost immediately and connecting them to global professional networks that they can rely upon long after their programs end.

YSE launched two new certificate programs in 2024: The Urban Climate Leadership Certificate Program educates and empowers leaders — especially those from the Global South — to accelerate urban solutions for a climate-ready future, while the Clean and Equitable Energy Development Certificate Program is focused on foundational energy concepts and energy justice.  The Green Chemistry for Climate and Sustainability Certificate will launch this year, and certificate programs in Environmental Data Science and Climate Change Communication are currently in development.

We invite you to take part in celebrating all that we have accomplished together — remembering the remarkable work of those who were here before us — and reflecting on what we hope to achieve in the future! Follow our anniversary coverage.

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Anniversary Events

 
13 Feb

Yale Forest Forum

  • A History of People, Forests, and Forestry
  • 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
  • Thursdays through April 23
Ali Zaidi portrait
14 Feb

Rethinking Climate Change Progress with Ali Zaidi

  • White House National Climate Advisor (2022 – January 2025)
  • 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
  • Kroon Hall, New Haven, CT
Event poster
27 Feb

Abundant Narratives on Land & Indigeneity

  • 2 Days
  • Kroon Hall, and Zoom
Graphic of a simulated mountain range of overlapping colors
08 May

New Horizons in Conservation

  • 2025 Convening
  • 4 Days
  • New Haven, CT
SAF 25
22 Oct

SAF National Convention

  • From Roots to Canopy: 125 Years of Forestry and Natural Resources
  • 4 Days
  • Hartford, CT
participants in the 2024 conference
06 Nov

Yale Clean Energy Conference

  • 2 Days
  • New Haven, CT
Treetop level view of a forest canopy
31 Jan

31st Annual ISTF Conference

  • Governing Resilient Tropical Forest Systems
  • 2 Days
  • Kroon Hall and Zoom
Yale Center for Business and the Environment
08 Feb

2025 Business and the Environment Conference

  • 8:00 am - 3:30 pm
  • Evans Hall, New Haven, CT

Research in the News