Biography of Dr Ulf Erlingsson

Ulf Birger Erlingsson (born May 7, 1960, in Knislinge, Sweden), doctor of Physical Geography, is a Swedish-American businessman and human rights activist.
Already as a 13-year old he was one of the founders of the local chapter of a national youth organization, Knislinge Fältbiologer, the purpose of which was the study of nature and the advocacy for nature conservation and sustainable development.
At the age of 19 he started studying at Lund University and got a BSc in geosciences. A couple of summers he spent on the Tarfala glaciological station, the first place in the world where continuous measurements of the mass balance of glaciers were started.
Being a conscientious objector to the compulsory military service, he instead served one year on a farm at Gråborg on Öland, a village owned by Vitterhetsakademien and maintained using traditional methods without fertilizers or pesticides, using centuries-old agricultural methods.
At the age of 24 he initiated doctoral studies at Uppsala University, where he in 1990 got a PhD in Physical Geography on a thesis on the geomorphology of the bottoms off the coast of Österlen, Skåne. Serving as Principal Research Engineer for the acoustic surveying vessel Akusta he visited Surtsey off Iceland, the Egypt coast west of Alexandria, and hydropower reservoirs in Costa Rica. He also patented an instrument for measuring sediment erosion and accumulation.
After a post-doc period in Copenhagen, Denmark, he helped build up the Baltic University Programme, a cooperation program of universities around the Baltic Sea, consisting of about 80 universities on both sides of the recently fallen Iron Curtain. As responsible for the geographical information system, he helped establish 5 GIS labs in former Soviet Union universities.
As a partner in the consulting company AB Hydroconsult, he carried out projects in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemela, apart from in Sweden and Denmark. The most notable projects were the creating of a GIS of natural disasters in Nicaragua, and being the expert for the Swedish government for supervising the sediment spill monitoring of the Öresund Bridge construction, the largest spill monitoring project ever undertaken.
After moving to USA he wrote a book in which he interpreted Plato’s tale of Atlantis in the light of modern science in the field of Physical Geography, using his knowledge of GIS and underwater geomorphology. He concluded that Plato most likely had based his account on surviving accounts of prehistoric northwestern neolithic Europe, and that the story reflected not a single place and time but a large area during a long time. He has said that Atlantis as Plato described it never existed, but that the topos is partly based on real events, such as the drowning of Dogger Bank by the Storegga tsunami.
In politics, Dr. Erlingsson has all his life been a firm opponent of communism, nazism, fascism, and similar totalitarian ideologies. During the presidential primaries in USA in 2003, Erlingsson was engaged in the primary campaign of Dennis Kucinich, who was running on a strategy of bringing opposition to the war on Iraq to the Democratic primaries. Although Congressman Kucinich only obtained a few percent of the votes, he insisted on his right to speak at the convention, and used this to speak up against the plans to attack Iraq at a time when there was a virtual monopoly of pro-war opinion in the US public debate. Erlingsson was strongly opposed to the war on Iraq, as he was convinced that it was a war that the US could not win, and he considers that the subsequent events has vindicated his point of view.
In 2009 Erlingsson was a vocal defender of the interim presidency of Roberto Micheletti in Honduras, and argued that the arrest of president Manuel Zelaya was justified and constitutional under the governing laws, since he had violated a direct cease and desist order from the Supreme Court; since the arrest order was legally requested and issued; and since the presidency was passed on according to the prevailing succession rules.
In 2011 Erlingsson was a secret cofounder of an anti-castrocommunist resistance movement in Venezuela, Operación Libertad Venezuela. After a couple of years several persons betrayed the confidence and revealed his involvement. To this day most members remain in clandestinity. A notable exception is general Ángel Vivas, who has declared himself in open rebellion against the castrocommunist puppet regime in Caracas, from his home in a suburb of Caracas.
Erlingsson is the founder of the Florida corporation Lindorm, Inc., the principal business of which is to sell the sediment instrument he patented, sold under the brand name SediMeter™.

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Ulf Erlingsson