Dennis C. Pirages

Until the early 2010s Pirages continued to served as Professor Government and Politics at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. Around 2007 he had also started working at the Department of Political Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 1988 Pirages has been elected lifetime fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science.

Pirages is known for his political work on the environment, which according to Kassiola (1990), has long been a neglected field in political science. Notable exceptions however are William Ophuls, Lester W. Milbrath, Lynton K. Caldwell, Harold and Margaret Sprout, and Pirages, who all wrote extensively on the environment.

Prager (1990) argued that Pirages contributed with a different world view. Prager summarized, that:

Around the same time Robert L. Stivers had also published a pioneering work on the sustainable society. Another notable definition of the sustainable society was given by James C. Coomer Coomer (1979) described the sustainable society as a society "that lives within the self-perpetuating limits of its environment." According to Faber et al (2005) both perceptions of a sustainable society are static, and have the shortcoming that they don't take into account possible changes of the physical and social environments.

In the 1977 publication, The Sustainable Society: Implications for Limited Growth, edited by Pirages, he also published the article "A social design for sustainable growth." In this work Pirages gave one of the first definitions of sustainable growth, the sustainable society and its connection. Pirages (1977;10) started, that:

In 1975 Pirages was appointed Professor at the University of Maryland. In those days he had come into prominence after co-authoring the ARK II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives with Paul R. Ehrlich, which was published in 1974. In the late 1970s he contributed to The Global 2000 Report to the President, directed by Gerald O. Barney, and published in 1980. In the late 1990s Pirages also served as director of the Harrison Center on the Future Global Agenda at the University of Maryland.

In their 1974 book, entitled Ark II, Pirages and Paul R. Ehrlich contributed to the theory of social perception, and coined the term "dominant social paradigm" (DSP). This concept was defined as "a mental image of social reality that guides expectations in a society."

Pirages and Ehrlich (1974) conclude, that dominant social paradigm "even within a single industrial nation, must be considered as the common content of the paradigms shared by most individuals, although it does not, of course, encompass all views of all citizens."

In the year 1973–1974, Pirages took part of discussions around Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, with Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly and Robert Heilbroner to create a society "which Boulding tentatively called Society for Optimum Sustainability (S.O.S.)." Levallois (2010) summarized, that:

Born in Davenport, Iowa, Pirages obtained his BA from the State University of Iowa in 1964, and his PhD from Stanford University in 1969.

Dennis Clark Pirages (born July 30, 1942; Died October 1, 2020) is an American political scientist, environmentalist and former Harrison Professor of International Environmental Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, known for his work on the environment and sustainability questions.