Dan’s wife, Joyce Bromley, is here today to share in our celebration of Dan’s accomplishments. Joyce, will you please stand to be recognized and appreciated for your part in all this.

Dan Bromley has been known to virtually every environmental and natural resource economist over the last 34 years as the editor of Land Economics. At “Land,” Dan’s insistence on high-quality research—clearly explained—has sustained and expanded the wide readership of the journal despite the growing range of competitors in the field. <\p>

In one of Dan’s nominating letters, the author states that “Without a doubt, landmark applied papers have been published in Land Economics and Dan is responsible for this record. The journal is now one of our best, thanks to Dan’s intellectual leadership.” Dan himself has written or edited twelve books and thirty book chapters in addition to his numerous journal publications. His work is sometimes provocative, but always interesting. Dan’s research focuses on three other areas (in addition to the economics of natural resources and the environment):

• the institutional foundations of the economy;


• legal and philosophical dimensions of property rights;


• economic development.

Of course, some of Dan’s most widely cited works have appeared in JEEM and the AJAE. However, he has also published many highly regarded papers in the Development literature. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that many of the environmental and natural resources problems we face here in the U.S. actually pale in comparison to the burdens borne by developing countries—Dan has demonstrated that much of what we know could improve life for the citizens of other parts of the world, too.

Recently, Dan has been studying the process of immiserization, since the early 1960’s, for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In this work, he finds that, despite development assistance programs, growth seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient to mitigate misery. He has complemented this research interest with advice to the Republic of Sudan.

Dan also studies U.S. commercial fisheries policy and management, where his research has been designed to help assess recent efforts to buy back fishing permits and vessels to reduce harvesting capacity. He recently completed a three-year term as Chair of the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Marine Protected Areas; he has also advised the State of Alaska on crafting a new fisheries policy in the Gulf of Alaska.

In looking at the institutional affiliations of the authors who most frequently cite Dan’s work, it is not surprising that the USDA is right near the top of the list. Dan’s thinking is demonstrably relevant to the problems faced by our government agencies. Given his other work on the some of the philosophical issues in our field, he also has a very sizeable following among researchers who publish in Ecological Economics (fully 70 citations there), despite the often-competing viewpoints of that constituency and ours.

Along with Richard Bishop, Dan was instrumental in the establishment of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Economics Department a the leading source for many of the scholars who have become today’s senior faculty in resource and environmental economics.

For his three decades of dedicated service to (and influence on) our profession as editor of Land Economics; for his research that is relevant to the management of environmental and natural resource problems—both in our part of the world and in developing countries; and for his willingness, when called upon, to provide appropriate and valuable advice to policy makers both here and abroad concerning many significant and growing resource problems, we today induct Daniel W. Bromley as a 2007 Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Congratulations, Dan!