Obituary of Jonathan Plaut

Jonathan Plaut of Summit, New Jersey, who had broad international experience and reputation on environmental policy and management, died at his home in Summit, New Jersey, on November 15, 2016. He was 80 years old. Mr. Plaut was an appointee in 1994 of President Clinton to the NAFTA Environmental Commission and three times was elected Chair of its Joint Public Advisory Committee by his environmental peers who served with him. He retired in 1966 as Corporate Director of Environment after 30 years with Allied Signal. Later he was a senior adviser to the United Nations Environmental Program in New York. Mr. Plaut was a Visiting Professor at Penn State on environmental policy from 1990-2002, and later taught at Rutgers University and Ramapo College. For many years, he was on the faculty at the Governor's School for New Jersey gifted high school students. Mr. Plaut won a Superior Performance Award when he worked in the Kennedy Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. He was Chair of the Union County New Democratic Coalition conference, a liberal political organization in opposition to the Vietnam War. He was also active in local Summit, NJ politics, running unsuccessfully for town council twice. He was co-chair of the World Industry Forum and of the industry delegation at the World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Mr. Plaut was vice chair of USEPA task force on trade and the environment before the passage of NAFTA. Mr. Plaut was one of the main initiators of industrial environmental programs through his work at Allied Signal and with industry more generally. He received coverage for this groundbreaking industrial environmental leadership in the New York Times, Business Week and in Harvard University School of Business case studies. He was co-founder of the Tufts Environmental Literacy project, which won a Presidential conservation medal in 1990. He lectured widely on environmental subjects, including at Penn State, Harvard, MIT, and the Royal Society of Medicine in London. He was President of the Board of Directors of Global Learning, an environmental non-governmental organization in New Jersey, dedicated to sustainability education. Mr. Plaut was a prolific writer, including journal articles and an environmental novel, SOUR LAKE TEXAS, as a regular contributor to the Worrall Newspapers in New Jersey on the New York metropolitan arts scene. He lectured monthly for many years in film and library series. He was a trustee of the Summit Public Library. In earlier years, he had been president of the Regional Board of Health, as well as a charter member of the Summit Civil Rights Commission. Mr. Plaut earned a B.S. degree in engineering from Penn State in 1957, a J.D. in law from Georgetown University Law School in 1961, and LL.M in law in 1966 from New York University, and an M.A. in cinema from NYU in 1970. Jonathan Plaut was born in New York City and grew up in Belle Harbor, Queens and Rockville Centre, NY. His father, Abraham Plaut, was a teacher and baseball coach at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and was the subject of an Op-Ed article Mr. Plaut wrote about the heroism of his father' death, published in the New York Times on June 16, 1985. He and his wife Anne Friedberg Plaut, who survives him, were married on March 29, 1958, in Brookline, MA. They had three sons: David, a founder of HannaPlaut, Austin, TX, who is married to Jane Webre; Jeffrey, a political strategist with Global Strategy Group in New York City, who is married to Amy Karas Plaut; and Joshua, a lawyer, who pre-deceased him in 2011. In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by five grandchildren, Edward and Samuel, of Austin; and Jacob, Abraham and Sophie, of Montclair, NJ. He was a long-time member of Temple Sinai, Summit, NJ. Shiva is being observed at his home on Thursday, November 17, from 5 to 7 p.m., with a service at 7 p.m., and on Sunday, Nov, 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. with a service at 4 p.m.