| I’m
a PhD student in the University of Idaho's Environmental Science
Program. I'm also a westerner, with my master's in Anthropology from the University
of Oregon, and a B.A. in Classics & Anthropology from the University
of Colorado. I've lived throughout the western U.S., as well as in the
Arctic, Central America, and Bulgaria. My work life began outdoors--15
years of archaeology and anthropology, with some construction and landscape
work in the middle. This all gave me many opportunities to observe and
be amazed at the way humans have interacted with their environment, from
the distant past into the present day. Eventually, my career led me
indoors to be a business owner, a newspaper copyeditor, and for the past 5
years, a specialist in environmental cleanup planning and stakeholder communication for
a major Dept. of Energy nuclear research facility (the Idaho National
Engineering Laboratory, in eastern Idaho).
Do careers as diverse as archaeology and editing,
environmental cleanup and landscape design, environmental ethics and dirt,
have anything in common? Yes. (Me!) No, seriously: they are
all integrative disciplines, in which lots of pieces (data, or lumber)
must be assembled into something that functions... as an explanatory
model, a cleanup plan, an article teaching some ideas, or a theory about
our environment.
In
the
environmental science program, my focus begins with soil and expands to consider
how cultural values affect our relationship to soil, which we so often
call "dirt," showing its low value. My
interest in environmental philosophy is how such a value system,
our individual lives and cultural tradition, science, and environmental
realities interact to
structure human perceptions of the environment. With my research on
"dirt" and our philosophy of soil, I hope to show how this
relationship arose and how it now can and must change in order to help us
achieve sustainability with each other and our planet. Environmental
beliefs also pose challenges to the classic
philosophical and ethical traditions, and to scientific practices and
privilege. In my environmental philosophy, I hope to explore these
on a theoretical basis. In my environmental practice, I work toward
sustainability and awareness as an individual, in my profession, and as a
member of organizations like Soil Stewards, the university's new
student-run organic farm and community food systems group, and as the
person who created the Sustainability Seminar in 2003.
At UI I've taught the Sustainability Seminar, as well as
Environmental
Philosophy some half-dozen times in numerous formats; introductory ethics
(Phil 103 sections) and a summer session of Ethics for Environmental
Science students. I re-shape each class, each time to highlight the interests of each group of students, to bring in the
most current research, and to try new ways to add clarity and liveliness
to the class. My other teaching over the years has included various
subjects in anthropology and archaeology, with field classes in places
from Oregon to Mesoamerica being my favorite! Email me or drop by my
office if you know ways
to make any of my classes work better for you or others.
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