RAMBLING CV OF  HENRY A. REGIER

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto;

Adjunct Professor, University of Waterloo and Michigan State University,

Henry Regier was born in a homesteader's log house in 1930 in Alberta, Canada.  He obtained an Honours BA, First Class, from Queen's University in Canada in 1954. He then obtained a professional teaching certificate at the University of Toronto and taught secondary school at Niagara Falls, Ontario for two years. He completed PhD studies, on a transdisciplinary ecogenic theme at Cornell in the USA in 1961.

Regier’s participated in stream surveys in Ontario in 1954-5. In 1961-3 he conducted research on fisheries in Lake Erie for the Ontario Government.  He returned to Cornell, first as a post-doctoral fellow of Douglas Robson in Biometrics with a US National Institute of Health Fellowship, and then as a faculty colleague of Alfred Eipper as assistant leader of a federally-funded Co-operative Fishery Unit. 

In 1966 he joined the University of Toronto, as a professor of zoology and eventually also of environmental studies.  In 1989-94 he was director of the graduate-level, transdisciplinary Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired from the university in 1995 and serves as Professor Emeritus. He is also Adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife at Michigan State University.

Regier has always worked on practical empirical issues iteratively with the more academic conceptual issues.  Since the mid-1950s his dialectical approach has iterated between the local and global and all levels in between. Thus he has been involved as an ecologist with the "Toronto Area Waters" since 1954 conducting scientific studies, supervising graduate students, advising colleagues of the Metro Planning Department and the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, etc.  Similarly he has worked on Great Lakes and especially Lake Erie issues since 1955.  Since 1985 he has been involved scientifically at all levels from local to global with the issue of climate change, e.g. he was a lead author for the fisheries chapter of Volume 2 of Climate Change 1995 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Regier and his graduate students and research associates have published more than 100 papers in the peer-reviewed primary literature and a comparable number in the peer-reviewed secondary literature, the latter often as chapters of books.

In 1970-71, while on sabbatical, Regier was chief of the stock assessment branch of the Fisheries Department of the FAO in Rome.  Since the 1960s he has maintained interdisciplinary expert connections concerning human use of aquatic systems in North America, Africa and Europe.  He has served in expert and often organizational roles, mostly related to science, under the auspices of FAO (ACMRR, UNCLOS), ICSU (IBP), UNESCO (MAB), UNEP (Indicators), IIASA (Sustainable Re-Development), INTECOL (Ecosystem Science), IPCC (Climate Change), etc.

Regier was a member of Canada's delegation to the Second World Food Congress in The Hague in 1970.  He participated with an NGO in the 1972 Stockholm Conference of the Human Environment.  (In 1971, as an FAO officer he co-authored a background document on fisheries for the Stockholm Conference, on behalf of FAO and UNESCO.)  He was an expert advisor within the Canadian delegations to two UN conferences on the human population, - in Bucharest in 1974 and Cairo in 1994.

From 1980 to 1989 he served as a Canadian commissioner on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.  From 1987 to 1990 he served on the Great Lakes Science Advisory Board of the International Joint Commission of Canada and the USA; this Board was then chaired by Al Beeton and Jack Vallentyne.

Concerning reviews of scientific programs, Regier was a member of several panels sponsored jointly by the US National Research Institute; he co-chaired one of these in the mid-1980s that assessed the state of science relevant to the 1978 binational Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In about 1980 he served on contract with the Auditor General of Canada concerning fisheries issues and again in 2001 on the Canadian federal government's environment-related role in the Great Lakes / St. Lawrence River Basin.  He was a member of a panel to review aquatic science in Finland for the Finnish Academy in 1992 and again for the Government of Finland in 1999.  On two occasions, 20 years apart, he was a member of a panel that reviewed that part of the science component of the US Environmental Protection Agency being administered from Corvallis, Oregon. He has helped to review environmental programs in several universities, i.e. British Columbia, Brock, Carleton, Royal Roads and Waterloo.

Since retiring in 1996, Regier was a member for five years of the board of a not-for-profit corporation, the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, that is helping to mobilize information relevant to fisheries conflicts between Aboriginal People and Non-Natives. From 1999 to 2001 he served as a member of a Joint Panel of the National Energy Board/Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.  The project, which proposed to lay a 36-inch natural gas pipeline across Lake Erie, was withdrawn by the proponents.

As a non-partisan expert and friend he has advised senior politicians including Charles Caccia, David Crombie and Jack Layton concerning Toronto's ecosystem.  He has continued in an advisory role with several Great Lakes agencies and institutions, such as IJC and Environment Canada. He participates in local efforts to correct environmental abuses, including pollution in what is called Canada's Love Canal in Elmira, Ontario.

With colleagues Regier received the Conservation Award of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists in 1980 for pioneering work on rehabilitation of degraded aquatic ecosystems.  In 1986 he was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Royal Society of Canada for co-leadership in a review of the science being done in support of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1992 he received the Award of Excellence of the American Fisheries Society, of which he was president in 1978-9.  In 1993 he presented the Vollenweider Lecture at the National Water Research Institute of Canada in Burlington, Ontario.  In 1996 the International Joint Commission presented him with a plaque of appreciation "for over two decades of extraordinary personal and professional service to the IJC, as in spearheading adoption of an ecosystem approach." Together with Joe Leach, his work especially on Lake Erie was acknowledged by the International Association of Great Lakes Research in a commemorative symposium and its 2000 proceedings.

Mrs. H. Lynn Regier, his wife, is a psychotherapist.  They have two daughters and four grandchildren.