Faculty
Constance Clark
As a historian of science interested in the environment and environmental history, and in the ways in which ideas about science are communicated, translated and mistranslated in popular and vernacular culture, I am especially interested in the history of ecology and the relationship of ecological sciences to popular ideas about the environment. How have people across cultures and over time thought about the natural world? What kinds of unexamined preconceptions and assumptions have colored our understandings of nature? What do we mean by nature? How have nature, the environment, and environmental problems been represented in popular media? How have science and technology been represented? What has been the relationship between science, technology, the built environment and the natural world? What are the common understandings of the science of ecology and its relationship to the environmental movement? How has the history of these ideas and attitudes affected the way we live in and think of the natural world? These are some of the questions I am examining in my research and teaching, and which I would like to invite interested students to consider. Read more...
Jim Doyle
Environmental problems can, and should, be studied using a variety of academic approaches and levels of analysis. But as a psychologist I am interested in taking complex, global problems and drilling down to their origins in individual thoughts, motivations, and behaviors. Thus my approach to the study of a problem like global warming is to make it personal: e.g., why do people buy SUVs instead of more fuel-efficient alternatives? Why do they recycle diligently but fail to buy products made out of recycled materials? Why do people focus on trivial environmental decisions such as paper versus plastic instead of the most impactful ones like where to live and work? And, finally, based on how people actually make environmental decisions, what sort of societal program to promote behavior change makes the most sense? Read more …
Roger Gottlieb
Why do we care if all the Polar bears die? What responsibility do we have not to leave a polluted earth for our great grandchildren? Is the sense of sacred awe some of us feel in the forest or at the ocean just a feeling--or does it tell us something about reality? These questions are essential to understanding what the environmental crisis means--and how it should change our lives. And these are the questions I think about, write about, and teach. Read more…
Scott Jiusto
My research interests are in environmental policy and philosophy, particularly energy policy and the pursuit of sustainability. I study energy issues because contestation over energy policy and energy technologies immediately lead to many of the most urgent challenges facing human beings, such as reducing international conflict, environmental degradation, climate change, inequality, and poverty while fostering new opportunities for sustainable “green” economies and healthier communities. These are all intensely interdisciplinary challenges that unfold through closely intertwined social, political, and technical processes. Read more…
Rob Krueger
Is the natural environment something as tangible as a stand of trees, a glacial pothole or a rocky down? Does the environment transcend culture, class and other social phenomena? Are environmental issues merely problems in search of a technological fix? My research, writing, and teaching examines the environment as a product of people and their institutions. The environment is embedded in various social and cultural contexts. These contexts produce environments that shape the human-environment experience. They determine whether one’s environment is pristine or an amenity, or a source of physical suffering and hardship. To understand human-environment relationships requires that we advance an interdisciplinary approach for examining the social context of the natural world. Read more…
John MacDonald
View Professor MacDonald’s web page.
Lauren Matthews
Ecological responses to anthropogenic habitat changes may be complex and, in many cases, are still poorly understood, and therefore a great deal of basic research is necessary to inform policy decisions related to the management of natural systems. My research activities focus on freshwater ecosystems, which are particularly vulnerable to human-induced ecological changes. We are interested in asking questions regarding the ecological impacts of invasive species, habitat alteration, and chemical contamination in local watersheds, the project crosses disciplines into environmental chemistry and engineering, as well as environmental policy at local and broader levels. We have made great strides in this area over the last several years thanks to enthusiastic involvement by many undergraduate and graduate students, and there are continued opportunities for future research students. Read more...
Jeanine Plummer
As an environmental engineer, my main focus is on drinking water quality. While you might think that engineering is all that is needed to solve water contamination problems, I also need to be a microbiologist, public health specialist, and manager to tackle this problem. My microbiology skills allow me to enumerate organisms and pathogens in drinking waters, and the public health field allows me to use those data to predict public health risks from waterborne disease. Once problems are identified, it takes an engineer to design the solutions, but a manager to ensure they are cost effective and accepted by the community. It’s a challenge to incorporate many disciplines – but leads me to my ultimate goal of providing safe water to consumers. Read more…
Kent Rissmiller
As a professor of politics and law, I’m interested in finding new, effective policy approaches for dealing with environmental problems. Effective policies are both supported by the public and fit into our pre-existing legal system of state and federal power, and individual rights and liberties. They are policies that are easily adopted by decision makers, easily implemented by bureaucrats and open to evaluation by policy analysts. But environmental solutions have many sources and engage many actors and institutions. We must ask: What can individuals do? What can NGOs do? What can business do? And, how can government facilitate the cooperation of all these entities in solving environmental problems? Read more…
Tom Robertson
I am a U.S. environmental historian, with expertise in the history of environmental politics and American foreign relations. Through my research and teaching, I hope to help people understand how the nature around them—whether backyard, neighborhood, local park, or farm, national park, or wilderness area—has a complicated history that links people and ecosystems both near and far in surprising and important ways. Contemporary environmental problems can’t be understood without knowing these histories, and our histories can’t be known without seeing how and where nature figures into them. I have two research projects underway: a history of how American environmentalists have thought about population growth from the 1930s to the 1980s, and an environmental history of U.S. development projects in Nepal from the 1950s to the 1980s. Read more…
Khalid Saeed
View Professor Saeed’s web page.
John Sanbonmatsu
I am especially interested in the ideologies and practices that establish human domination over other sentient beings. How do modern societies establish political 'right' over other the minds and bodies of other animals? What is the relationship between capitalism as a mode of civilizational development, on the one hand, and the extermination, enslavement, and alienation of human and nonhuman beings, on the other? How do we think about radical collective action and social change in a context of widespread ecological destruction, climatic havoc, and social inequality? These are some of the questions I am trying to think through with my students. Read more...
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