Paul Sabin

Paul Sabin teaches United States environmental history, energy politics, and political, legal, and economic history.  He coordinates the Yale Environmental History working group, and helps to run Yale’s undergraduate Environmental Studies major. 

Professor Sabin is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (Yale University Press, 2013), which draws on an iconic story about population and resources to examine the clash between environmentalists and their critics since the late 1960s.  His first book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940 (University of California Press, 2005), explores how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation.  His current research examines the evolution and impact of modern environmental law and regulation in the United States.  Professor Sabin has published articles on legal history, energy history, and international resource frontiers in Environmental History, the Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, Pennsylvania History, and the California Supreme Court Historical Society Handbook.  His articles have received the Ray Allen Billington Award, W. Turrentine Jackson Prize, and Robert G. Crist Pennsylvania History Prize.

Professor Sabin received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation won the 2001 W. Turrentine Jackson Award (American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch).  He was a Harvard-Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellow in business history at the Harvard Business School.  Professor Sabin 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 500 talented public leaders from higher education, government, businesses, and non-profit organizations.  He presently serves on the Environmental Leadership Program’s Board of Trustees.