Wes Jackson was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. After attending Kansas Wesleyan (B.A Biology, 1958), he studied botany (M.A. University of Kansas, 1960) and genetics (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 1967). He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies department at California State University, Sacramento, where he became a tenured full professor. He resigned that position in 1976 and returned to Kansas to found The Land Institute. Dr. Jackson’s writings include both papers and books. New Roots for Agriculture (1980) outlines the basis for the agricultural research at The Land Institute. His most recent work, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (2022), was co-authored with Robert Jensen. Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions (2021) delves into the life lessons that helped shape Jackson’s worldview. Nature as Measure (2011) and Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (2010), were both published by Counterpoint Press. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008) and Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996), were co-edited with William Vitek. Becoming Native to This Place, 1994, sketches his vision for the resettlement of America's rural communities. Altars of Unhewn Stone (1987) links science and cultural wisdom in a call for whole, healthy, and sustainable agriculture. Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984) was edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman. Jackson is a recipient of the Pew Conservation Scholars award (1990), a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), Right Livelihood Award (Stockholm), known as “Alternative Nobel Prize” (2000), and the Louis Bromfield Award (2010). He has received six honorary doctorates. In 2007 he received the University of Kansas Distinguished Service Award and was one of the 2011 recipients of the University of Kansas College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Distinguished Alumni Awards. Garden Club of America awarded him the Elizabeth Craig Weaver Proctor Medal in 2012. In addition to lecturing nationwide and abroad, Dr. Jackson is involved outside The Land Institute with a variety of projects including being a Post Carbon Institute Fellow.

In this reflective interview, Wes Jackson recalls the influences on his thinking and his work in the field of environmental science and research. His thinking was embodied in the Land Institute which he co-founded in the mid-1970s after leaving academia. That perspective is firmly based on the connections between science, sociology, political science, religion, and literature that bring them all into one rather than separate silos. That all-encompassing view, using the prairie as a model, informs his thinking about sustainability, broadly writ, that is multi-fascited and based on an appreciation of "outghtness" -- doing things the way they ought to be done.