Dennis T. Avery
Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute and Director of its Center for Global Food Issues
Dennis T. Avery has been a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute since 1989. Prior to that, he was a senior analyst in the U.S. Department of State (1980–1988), where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. He also holds outstanding performance awards from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
He is an outspoken advocate of free trade in farm products, and of the environmental importance of well-managed high-yield farming. Dennis has testified numerous times to both Senate and House Congressional committees on agricultural and conservation issues and has presented papers at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and many other forums.
Avery’s book Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming was first published in 1995, with a second edition in 2000. It continues to be popular both in classrooms and with the general public.
Avery currently writes a weekly column on environmental issues, which is distributed to newspapers throughout the country. His writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Seattle Times, Des Moines Register,and dozens of other newspapers. He has also been featured in Fortune, Forbes, The National Journal,and in The Atlantic Monthly (“Will Frankenfoods Save the Planet?” [October 2003).
The inspiration for his 2007 best seller, co-authored with S. F. Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500-Years, came when Avery wrote a 1998 article in Hudson’s American Outlook magazine titled “Global Warming: Boon for Mankind?” The article noted that “the Medieval Warming was one of the most favorable periods in human history. Crops were plentiful, death rates diminished, and trade and industry expanded—while art and architecture flourished.” The article was later condensed in The Reader’s Digest (August 1999).
He lives on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with his wife, Anne where he spends his spare time cutting wood for the outdoor wood-burning furnace, riding his horse, and trying to keep the fences mended.
