Bud Ward for nearly 30 years has been an environmental journalist and journalism educator in Washington, D.C. He started his environmental journalism career in 1974 as Managing Editor of The Bureau of National Affairs' (BNA) Environment Reporter. In 1982, after serving for three years as Assistant Director of the U.S. Congress's National Commission on Air Quality, under the Clean Air Act, he founded and edited The Environmental Forum, a monthly policy magazine. Ward in 1988 established the Environmental Health Center as an environmental communications division of a large nonprofit organization, and he that year founded Environment Writer, a monthly newsletter specifically for reporters and editors covering natural resources and environmental issues, since mid-2002 published by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, at the University of Rhode Island.

An original co-founder of the independent Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), of which he now is one of six Honorary Members, Ward has written two books on environmental regulatory issues and has authored more than 1,000 bylined articles on environmental issues for a variety of general and specialized publications. He in two different periods served as a regular analyst and commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," and he has written environmental technology pieces for Encyclopedia Britannica.

He founded and managed the foundation-funded Central European Environmental Journalism Program. He has served on National Research Council and H. John Heinz III Center for Economics, Science, and the Environment advisory boards, and he has been a member of the Radio and Television News Directors' Foundation's environmental journalism advisory committee and of the Loyola University New Orleans Center for Environmental Communications advisory board. He earned BA and MA degrees from Penn State University.