Dr. Lawrence S. Hamilton is a partner with his wife Linda Hamilton, in ISLANDS AND HIGHLANDS Environmental Consultancy based in rural Vermont, USA. He is Emeritus Professor of Natural Resources of Cornell University, having taught and researched there for 29 years, 1951-1980. In 1993 he completed a 13-year tenure as Senior Fellow at the East West Center's Program on Environment where he worked in the arena of watershed land use, protected areas, tropical rainforest conservation and sustainable land use in small islands in the Asia-Pacific region.

Since 1970 Professor Hamilton has been an active volunteer with the World Conservation Union (IUCN). For several years he served on the Commission on Ecology and the Commission on Education. Since 1987 he has been an active member of the World Commission on Protected Areas, and in that Commission was appointed Vice-Chair for Mountains in 1991. In this capacity, he and Linda Hamilton produce a quarterly newsletter called Mountain Protected Areas UPDATE that nourishes a network of some 520 scientists and managers dealing with this topic around the world. He currently represents IUCN in the follow-up to the Mountain Chapter of Agenda 21, in a series of UN, national government and NGO activities.

Born in Canada, Professor Hamilton received his undergraduate education in forestry at the University of Toronto. During his forestry career, he worked on one of the last log drives on a river in Northern Ontario, working on a logging crew, in a sawmill, cruising timber in the far north. He became a district forester in the Province of Ontario working with reforestation of degraded farmlands and management of small private woodlots, and went to Cornell University in 1951 first as Extension Forester and then into teaching and research.

He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Natural Resource Policy. He has been recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships and a University grant which took him as a visiting professor to University of Queensland (Australia), University of New England (Australia) and Waikato University (New Zealand), and a National Science Post-Doctoral Fellowship which took him to the University of California at Berkeley. He has carried out consultancies in Australia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Trinidad and Bhutan for IUCN, USAID, Sierra Club, The World Bank and UNESCO, and has had writing consultancies for GEF and FAO. More than 290 publications have been authored, co-authored or edited during this lengthy career, including several books. The two most recent hardcover books were Ethics, Religion and Biodiversity (1993), and Tropical Montane Cloud Forests (1995).