Robert Ovetz

Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. is an adjunct instructor of social science at two San Francisco Bay Area community colleges, a published writer and musician.

Books and Publications

Ovetz has appeared on CNN, NPR, Air America radio and numerous newspapers and magazines around the world including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Business Times, Post-Courier (Papua New Guinea), Orlando Sentinel, Kyodo News (Japan), UPI, Reuters, Canberra Times (Australia), Bloomberg, The Ecologist (UK), Z Magazine, and the BBC. His report "The Bottom Line: An Investigation of the Economic, Cultural and Social Costs of Industrial Longline Fishing in the Pacific and the Benefits of Sustainable Use Marine Protected Areas" was published by the United Nations in 2005.

His writings have also been published in numerous academic journals including Capital & Class, Common Sense, Environmental Practice, Critical Sociology, California Sociology, Journal of Environmental Education, New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, and Marine Policy. He also worked as an editor for Kluwer Law International And Co-edited the book Reforming the International Financial System (Forum on Debt and Development: The Netherlands, 2000). He has also contributed to the books Restructuring the Universities (Red Thread: Greece, 2008) and Utopia Today—Reality Tomorrow: A Vegetarian World (European Vegetarian Union: Italy, 2005).

Ovetz is currently working on edited book projects for PM Press of Oakland including a collection of writings of Harry Cleaver, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ocean Conservationist

Until recently, Ovetz worked extensively as a marine conservation advocate. He was the Executive Director of the marine conservation non-governmental organization Seaflow, International Campaigns Director with Humane Society International, and the International Campaign Coordinator with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. With the last NGO Ovetz achieved the first ever protections for sea turtles at the United Nation in 2005.

Reported on Zapatistas for CNN

In 1994, Ovetz was the first english speaking journalist to break the story of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas Mexico and interviewed the infamous Subcommandante Marcos as a freelance reporter for CNN. His interview is cited in the book Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2007).

Ovetz was awarded the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information James Madison Award in 2007 for his efforts to defend his student's magazine Mute/Off which was censored by the Art Institute of California-San Francisco and he was fired after teaching at the college for 3 years.

Born in New York City, he attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received his BA, MA and PhD. His father, Arye Ovetz, was a holocaust survivor from Romania whose was imprisoned for several years s a young boy in a forced labor camp by the Romanian fascist government in the 1940s.

Musician and Filmmaker

Ovetz is also a musician and has released a number of records and CDs with his former band ultrasound (autonomy recordings, Drone Records, Ba Da Bing! and Time Lag Records). He also filmed and edited the short documentary film "Goniff Romania" about his father's first and only return to Romania, the country of his birth, after an absence of nearly 50 years and the struggle to recovered the lost history of the forced labor camps.