# Michael Tobias

Michael Charles Tobias (born June 27, 1951) is an American author, environmentalist, mountaineer, and filmmaker. In 1991, Tobias produced a ten-hour dramatic television series, Voice of the Planet, for Turner Broadcasting; the series starred William Shatner. Tobias has written numerous books, most notably World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium.

## Early life and career

In 1977, Tobias received a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the History of Consciousness, a humanities department.
He directed a mountaineering film in 1984. Called Cloudwalker, it was recorded for the UK's Channel 4. The film chronicled a failed attempt at an ascent on the Moose's Tooth in the Ruth Gorge Amphitheatre of Alaska's McKinley range (now Denali).

## Conservation

Michael Tobias's PBS film Ahimsa –Nonviolence premiered in the United States on December 25, 1987. Taking three years to make, it was the first major film to portray the life of Jains (a religious group) in India. Southeast Asian religions professor Christopher Chapple said that the film "elegantly portrays several Jain leaders and extols the religion as the great champion of animal rights and nonviolent living".
In a cover story for the New York Academy of Sciences publication The Sciences, Tobias called for an Antarctic World Park, citing threats to the potential area for large-scale habitat preservation. He released a 1987 PBS film entitled Antarctica: The Last Continent with a similar topic, proposing the creation of an "international park" in Antarctica similar to national parks in the US. According to The Christian Science Monitor, the film explores "the discovery of Antarctica and the multinational claims to ownership".
In a Discovery Channel documentary about the Exxon Valdez disaster, named Black Tide, he considered the dilemma of safely using oil resources.
Tobias has been involved in wildlife preservation efforts. In New Zealand, he has overseen ecological restoration of a peninsula in the far south of the country, adjoining Rakiura National Park.
Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, first wife of the fourth king of Bhutan, described Tobias's efforts as being "invaluable for policymakers and scientists ... [and] inspiration for the next generation of young ecologists wanting to make a difference in the world".

## Population and environment

Tobias wrote a book about the growing world population, the environment, and the potential for a third world war called World War III: Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium.
The magazine Psychology Today wrote that it "reads like a volcano erupting ... Tobias throws sparks like an evangelist and has the old-fashioned, wide-ranging erudition of a Renaissance scholar". Scientist Marc Lappé described World War III as "a lengthy and complex treatise that is a distillation of a lifetime of thought and action concerning the human condition. ... It provides a thread of hope, offering a new vision about how humankind may ultimately come to peace with nature." Anthropologist Jane Goodall, writing of the book in 1998, said, "Tobias describes for us a path that we could take – a path mapped out by a combination of scientific, logical, intuitive, and spiritual reasoning – towards a future where all is not, after all, lost." In her foreword to World War III, she also said that Tobias has provided "ample scientific proof of the large-scale habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity that has and continues to take place". In 1994, during the UN International Conference on Population and Development, the Montreal Gazette quoted Tobias: "For purposes of absolute clarity I call it World War III," as The Gazette extrapolated from Tobias's perspective, "the most terrifying problem humanity has ever faced".
Tobias directed a feature-film documentary called No Vacancy, which is based on his book and also focuses on the growing world population. Journalist Ellen Snortland, writing in the Pasadena Weekly, stated that "No Vacancy, written and directed by Michael Tobias, is to the world's population explosion what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is to global warming".

## Other works

Tobias received the international Courage of Conscience Award in 1996.
In 2004, Tobias received the Parabola Magazine Focus Award.
He delivered the annual address at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies in March 2012 as the opening for a symposium on conservation biology, animal rights, and comparative religions. Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, described Tobias as "one of the world's great souls". In 2013, Tobias gave an address to the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, the Research Centre for Sustainable Development, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at their annual conference in Tianjin and Binhai. He has also given addresses in Monterrey, Mexico, for the Fifth Conference on Worldwide Values, and at the 21st International Meeting of the Club of Budapest in Hungary.
Tobias is an honorary member of the Club of Budapest.
Tobias is a contributing writer for Forbes online.

## Teaching

From 2001 to 2002, Tobias was Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Environmental Studies. In 2016, he was a Martha Daniel Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College & State University.