Richard Sclove’s newest book — Escaping Maya’s Palace: Decoding an Ancient Myth to Reveal and Heal the Hidden Madness of Modern Civilization — won a 2023 Gold Nautlilus Book Award, capturing the top prize in the category “World Cultures’ Transformational Development & Growth.” Learn more and order here.
Richard founded and for thirteen years directed the Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making research, science, and technology responsive to democratically decided priorities. He is also a cofounder of the ECAST (Expert and Citizens Assessment of Science and Technology) network and of the Living Knowledge network.
He has been the Director of Strategic Planning at the Mind and Life Institute, co-founded by the Dalai Lama, and a Project Director at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
Richard’s 1995 book Democracy and Technology received the Don K. Price Award of the American Political Science Association honoring “the year’s best book in science, technology, and politics.” He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He has published in numerous venues, including the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, Adbusters, Yes! Magazine, Utne Reader, Tikkun, Huffington Post, Technology Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Science magazine, Nature magazine, Issues in Science and Technology, Futures, and Science, Technology and Human Values.
Dr. Sclove has taught and lectured at universities worldwide and delivered many plenary and keynote addresses. He has prepared invited testimony for the House Science Committee of the U.S. Congress and given one-on-one policy briefings to U.S. and other national decision-makers, including the Director of the National Science Foundation and the President’s Science Advisor.
Richard earned his B.A. degree in environmental studies from experimental, interdisciplinary Hampshire College and, from MIT, an M.S. in nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in political theory. He held the Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Richard has been a meditator for over 40years, studied with more than half a dozen spiritual teachers, and lived for a year in an ashram/orphanage in Varanasi, India.
In his spare time he enjoys travel, photography, reading novels with soul and wishing he had the talent to write them, running in the woods, biking, hiking, floating in calm waters under sunny skies, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.