Paul Sabin

Paul Sabin teaches United States environmental history and energy politics at Yale University, where he also directs the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. Sabin is the author of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (W.W. Norton, 2021), which examines the evolution and impact of the public interest and environmental movements in the United States since the 1960s. His previous book, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (2013), explored the clash between environmentalists and their critics in contentious debates over population growth and resource scarcity. Sabin's first book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940 (2005), showed how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation. In addition to scholarly articles, Sabin has written general interest essays for the New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications. Sabin received his doctorate in American History from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent a postdoctoral year as Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at the Harvard Business School.  He also served for nine years as the founding executive director of the non-profit Environmental Leadership Program, which has trained and supported a collaborative network of more than 1,300 talented public leaders from higher education, government, businesses, and non-profit organizations.