George Buckley is the Assistant Director of Sustainability at Harvard Extension School, with decades of broad experience with oceans and ocean life. He began his career by winning the state science fair in high school with a study of snail teeth. He earned a degree in biology at Suffolk University with further study at Tufts and Boston Universities. He has done extensive research on land snails, freshwater clams, coral reefs, and is an expert scuba diver who has led hundreds of students to study the sea.
He has worked on a series of curriculum programs on coastal ecology, river ecology, the earth sciences, astronomy and science education. He has been a long-time Associate at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and chief scientist on some two dozen Earthwatch Expeditions. As an activist he was instrumental in the creation of the Massachusetts bottle bill and the stopping a second pilgrim nuclear power plant. In recognition of his ocean work he received the “Diver of the Year Award” and with the award-winning NOVA TV program, “The Sea Behind the Dunes,” began a career in environmental filmmaking. His most recent film, Bonaire Bonanza, produced in collaboration with in collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Edward Snijders, is a success story of good reef management on the Caribbean island of Bonaire; it won the Palme d’Or Award in Marseilles.