Hans Landsberg, one of RFF’s intellectual founders and a pioneer in energy and mineral economics, died peacefully October 14, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 88.
Landsberg joined RFF in 1960, where he was among the first scholars to specialize in the role of energy in a modern economy. He gained national recognition for his groundbreaking 1963 RFF study, Resources in America’s Future, an economic and technological blueprint for projecting long-term requirements and availability of energy, nonfuel minerals, land, water, crops, and numerous other industrial materials, which he co-authored with Leonard Fischman and Joseph Fisher.
The work of Landsberg and his collaborators—including the landmark 1979 study, “Energy: The Next Twenty Years”—provided the impetus for what is now the routine and systematic collection and analysis of energy data by the federal government and private industry.
“Those of us here who knew Hans and worked with him over the years mourn the loss not only of a friend, but also someone who helped give RFF the reputation it enjoys today as the place to turn for factual data on trends in energy and mineral availability,” says RFF President Paul Portney.
“When others said we were running out of these key natural resources, Hans helped to prove otherwise. He was scrupulously careful in his work, and as independent as the day is long. Until the end of his long life, he was someone to whom reporters could turn for expert— and always understandable and entertaining—explanations of current events and policies.”
Landsberg built his career during turbulent times. Born in 1913 in East Prussia, he spent much of his youth in Berlin, fleeing in 1933 to escape the Nazi threat. After earning a degree at the London School of Economics, Landsberg came to the United States in 1936, where he earned a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer in Italy with the Office of Strategic Services. In Rome at the war’s end, he married Gianna Giannetti, who passed away in 1993. In the 1950s, he worked as a consulting economist and served on the staff of the Office of the Economic Adviser to the Israeli government.
Throughout his professional career, Landsberg served on a number of distinguished advisory panels for the National Academy of Sciences and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, among others. In 1972, he served as an adviser to Maurice Strong in his capacity as the secretary general of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. In 1974, Landsberg was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1982, he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The International Association of Energy Economists honored Landsberg in 1983 for his outstanding contributions to the field.
Joel Darmstadter, an RFF colleague with whom Landsberg frequently collaborated, says he will “cherish the memory of one who was both a close personal friend and an intellectual mentor. Hans had the ability to convey difficult ideas with an unforced, unhackneyed ease of expression, which deserves the envy of many writers.”
Michael Toman, RFF Senior Fellow, says Landsberg’s work was both grounded in pragmatism and audacious in the scope of the questions raised. “In his perceptiveness and breadth of vision about problems to be addressed and solutions to be found, as well as in the quality of his scholarship, he set a lofty example for all those who followed him in the field.”
Adds Senior Fellow Molly Macauley, “There was always a twinkle in his eye, and his door was always open, even to the rookies. He had more economic intuition than most, and a gracefulness with prose one can never learn in grad school. He helped weave the very fabric of RFF—it’s hard even to quantify just how very much we learned from him.”
Landsberg is survived by his daughter Ann S. Landsberg, his sister Dr. Eva Landsberg-Lewin, and his two grandsons, James Truslow and Max Baehr.
A version of this article appeared in print in the Fall 2001 issue of Resources magazine.
