Remembering Peter Seidel: Philanthropist, Futurist, and Good Soul

by Brian Czech

On July 20, at the age of 98, a giant in steady-state philanthropy left the world he worked so hard to help. Frederick George Peter Seidel (1928–2025) played a huge part for small organizations like the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). Peter was CASSE’s best friend, biggest benefactor, and broadest champion. His contributions ranged from academic and editorial to strategic and financial.

Without Peter, CASSE as we know it would not have existed. More than anyone, he lifted CASSE from the financial scree of struggling non-profits to a respected place in the landscape of sustainability think tanks.

On a personal note, I found something priceless in Peter: the encouraging support of a warm soul who provided unwavering moral support, camaraderie, and conviviality. When my own father—another Wisconsin man from the “greatest generation”—passed away, Peter became my go-to confidant for strength and encouragement.

Crossing Paths with a Kindred Thinker

As I recall, I first encountered Peter in 2003, at a U.S. Society for Ecological Economics conference in Saratoga Springs, New York. Our paths would cross regularly in that first decade of the 21st century. Not only did we find ourselves at the same conferences, but in the same sessions and in the same conversations—and invariably on the same side, in the event of controversy or debate.

And controversy was never far away. We both recognized the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. We both were incredulous to find so much “green growth” talk, even among environmental professionals and journalists. We both were determined to raise awareness of limits to growth, and to put an end to the win-win rhetoric that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.”

By the time I met him, Seidel was already an elder statesman of limits to growth. He had been spotting the red flags for decades before I came along with my specialty on the conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. Seidel had seen it all: DDT, a burning Cuyahoga River, Love Canal, the destruction of the ozone layer, coral bleaching, endangered species, resource shortages, and wars too numerous to speak of. Biodiversity loss and climate change were just two more insults—albeit huge ones—heaped upon a planet subjected to rabid GDP growth.

Academics, Adventure, and Architecture

Seidel and I hit it off with stories of work life and academic pursuits that, for each of us, started in our home state of Wisconsin. Venturing forth from his Milwaukee childhood, Seidel became a farmhand, factory worker, salmon fisherman in Alaska (in the days of log-trap fishing!), carpenter, professor, architect, urban planner, and author, roughly in that order. In the midst of the earlier tasks, after a year of college in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, he obtained a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Colorado.

Why Colorado, and not Wisconsin? Because Peter loved the outdoors, and the adventures that came with it. He loved his beautiful Wisconsin, for sure, and canoed the entire length of the Wisconsin River, from the headwaters on the Michigan border to its mouth along the mighty Mississippi. But, as with a lot of young, vigorous adventurers, he just had to get to the mountains, too. And he was a skier, so Colorado especially beckoned to him.

Mind you, I am going off memories of many conversations, scattered through the years, along with a handful of notes. Any chronological errors are on me. But somewhere in this mix of learning from and reveling in Planet Earth, Seidel performed a tour of duty in the Navy, right on the heels of World War II. The Navy capitalized on his keen mind for the development of sonar and radar technology, which sparked a broader interest in engineering.

Eventually returning to the Midwest for a Masters in Architectural Planning from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Seidel studied under renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In those days, Ph.D. degrees were much rarer, and not so necessary for a professorial life. Soon, Seidel was on the faculty of the University of Michigan, then Virginia Tech. He also taught at the Central China Institute of Science and Technology.

A Philanthropic Soul

I often wondered how the descendent of German immigrants with a farming and factory background found the money to support CASSE along with the Worldwatch Institute, Global Footprint Network, Union of Concerned Scientists, and social wellbeing campaigns too numerous to list. As I got to know him, eventually the story came out. Seidel’s sonar/radar stint in the Navy put the earliest computer technology on his radar. Decidedly not a materialistic spender, his modest savings gravitated toward the earliest stocks of IBM, General Electric, and eventually Microsoft. The rest is financial and philanthropic history.

Of course, it takes more than money to become a philanthropist. It takes heart and soul, passion and commitment. Seidel had all those characteristics in spades.

Among the many causes he took a supportive interest in—architecture, literature, urban planning to name a few—eventually his greatest passion became limits to growth. He attributed an awakening to futuristic concerns to The Crazy Ape by the wide-ranging Hungarian scholar Albert Szent-Györgyi. Crazy Ape planted in Peter, circa 1950s, a skepticism of human discernment that preoccupied his thinking for decades to come.

Seidel became active in the World Future Society (WFS), which started in 1966. This was somewhat of a heyday for limits to growth literature. Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful came out in the early 60s, and WFS members would cut their futuristic teeth on books such as The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits to Growth (1972), too.

By the time Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economics was published in 1977, Seidel was fully prepared to load up his conceptual toolkit with ecological macroeconomics. When the International Society for Ecological Economics was established in 1989, Seidel took an active interest, particularly in the prospects for raising awareness of limits to growth. He was not enamored, though, with the emphasis on microeconomics (such as estimating values of natural capital and ecosystem services), and favored a full-fledged focus on the limits to population and economic growth.

When CASSE was established in 2003, with its crystal-clear position on economic growth, Seidel quickly found it to be a favorite cause. He was one of the first 50 signatories of the CASSE position, along with the likes of Herman Daly, Bill Rees, and Richard Heinberg. A long-running relationship commenced.

Surrounded by Beauty

While I got well-acquainted with Peter’s professional, philosophical, and philanthropic interests, Peter was never one to boast of his personal life. Yet anyone who ever stayed with Peter at his Hamilton Avenue apartment, overlooking the famous Northside District, discovered his refined aesthetic tastes. Up on the 15^th floor, this early-rising gentleman would watch the morning light casting about the Northside District and the Buttercup Valley Preserve.

Woven among walls and tables of books, Peter had an art collection that was proportional and tasteful. One couldn’t miss it, but it didn’t steal the show, either. Not from the books, and certainly not from the life-sized photo-canvas of his beautiful, beloved wife, Angela. She was an opera singer who left the world far too early (1983) for Peter’s sake. But she also left him with musical memories that he built upon with a collection of classical and operatic scores.

Eventually, Peter used his aesthetically pleasing, inspiring surroundings to write a number of books, starting with the highly unique Invisible Walls. The mental, psychological “walls” he contemplated made it extremely challenging for Homo sapiens to deal with environmental, social, and political crises. CASSE was fortunate to publish (with our Steady State Press imprint) Peter’s culminating thoughts on these matters with Uncommon Sense: Shortcomings of the Human Mind for Handling Big-Picture, Long-Term Challenges.

Peter took on the challenge of futuristic fiction with 2045; a year that feels less futuristic by the day! Nine decades into life, Peter followed up with 2145: A Journey Into the Future (also with the Steady State Press).

While we journey into the uncertain future—we humans with our limited capacity to do right by the spectacular Earth we inherited—we can take heart from the fact that well-lived lives are not unprecedented. There’s a lot of hope in that, and it’s a good way to pay homage to Peter Seidel.

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Brian Czech is Executive Director of CASSE.