WETLANDS WORK - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Socio - Economic and Gender, Advisory Associate
Job Titles:
- Science and Environmental Engineering
The past is a linear prologue for Taber's initiating WW! in 2008 as a social entrepreneurial endeavor: he grew up on an island with surrounding wetlands and later worked on marine, coastal, estuarine, riverine and watershed issues.
He spent seven summers over the 1970s at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution working with scientists on wastewater treatment/aquaculture and wetlands ecology projects. At the NJ Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission in the 1980s, he promoted a combined landfill leachate and municipal sewage treatment project using wetland plants, and a management master plan for the 32-square mile district's estuarine wetlands. Subsequently, at the New York City Planning Department, he conceived and initiated plans for the management and treatment of stormwater using Staten Island's extensive wetland corridors. Known as the Blue Way, the realized program saved NYC over a billion dollars in infrastructure costs and is being replicated in the Croton watershed, source area for NYC's freshwater.
In the 1990s, Taber did his doctoral research on the ecological and economic linkages of the Mekong's flood pulsed Tonle Sap Lake, the world's most productive inland freshwater fishery. He has been Freshwater Programs Advisor for Conservation International in the Greater Mekong region, based in Phnom Penh, and is an advocate for natural and managed wetland systems as public infrastructure.
Taber Hand received a Botany-Zoology BA from Pomona College, an MA in Economic Geography from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in Ecological Economics from the University of Maryland.