SALT LAKE CITY — Gail Blattenberger, longtime professor of economics at the University of Utah, has devoted her life to three causes — peace, poverty, and the environment.
Her lifetime commitment to those causes has earned her the Gandhi Peace Award presented annually by the Gandhi Peace Alliance.
The award is the centerpiece of the annual Gandhi Birthday Celebration that will be held at the Tracy Aviary on Sunday, Sept. 28 at 3 p.m.
While still in high school, Blattenberger, who was born in 1947, became an activist in the civil rights movement and is still involved in problem solving and assisting others.
She says Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and her witnessing segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, while she was in college profoundly affected her and helped spur her work in civil rights advocacy.
Blattenberger became a professor in the economics department at the University of Utah in 1997. She taught econometrics, environmental economics and macroeconomics. She officially retired in 2012 but continues as an active professor emeritus and retains an office at the university.
Much of her academic focus has been concerned with problems of extreme economic inequality and the lack of economic consideration of environmental destruction.