Who'll Be There

I've been teaching at Middlebury since 1985 in both the Department of Biology and the Program in Environmental Studies. I’ve been director of the program on various occasions since 1986. For the ES program, I am one of the instructors in both our introduction to environmental science course and our senior capstone seminar. I also teach courses in conservation biology, natural history, and vertebrate biology. My fields of research include field ecology, conservation biology, and environmental education.

(trombulak@middlebury.edu)

I joined the Department of Natural Resources Conservation at the University of Massachusetts in 1988 and serve as professor and department head of a diverse group. The department has undergraduate programs in Environmental Science, Wildlife & Fisheries Conservation, Building Materials & Wood Technology, Forest Conservation, Urban Forestry & Aboriculture, and Natural Resources Studies. We have graduate programs in Forest Resources and Wildlife & Fisheries Conservation. My research and professional focus involves the performance of building systems in the area of energy efficient construction and sustainable building. My primary interest is green building, which involves the sustainable integration of natural and built environments.

(pfisette@nrc.umass.edu)

My field of expertise is contemporary Latin American literature, and I have taught and published on topics that apply ecocriticism to Latin American lit. I’ve also just completed a manuscript on  contemporary literary texts that depict environmental change and crisis in  Latin America. Currently, I serve on the oversight (and search) committee  for the newly inaugurated Enviromental Studies program at Wofford College.

(barbasrhodenlh@wofford.edu)

I teach courses in environmental planning, political ecology, and environmental policy as well as introductory classes. My research focuses on the everyday politics of community-based conservation and development. For more about me as well as links to the Environmental Center and Environmental Studies Program Web sites please see my personal Web page: http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/
pwilshus.

(peter.wilshusen@bucknell.edu)

I've been at UNCG since 1988 and director for Environmental Studies since 1999. Last year was our first year with a major; we now have about 30 majors. I teach the introductory course as well as three senior courses in law and policy (environmental, natural resources, and wildlife). We are truly interdisciplinary with 100 courses offered across 16 different departments. My research interests are also interdisciplinary; recent conference papers include institutional re-design for state wildlife agencies and portrayal of traditional commons in English literature.

(sjbuck@uncg.edu)

I've been at Wofford College for 21 years and my field is creative writing. I'm a poet and personal essayist. The subject matter of my work is often place-based, particularly concerning rivers. In the last decade I've been heavily involved with ASLE (Association for Study of Literature and Environment) and was even the co-host of the 2007 biennial conference at Wofford. My work in a learning community ("The Nature and Culture of Water") with my colleague biologist Ellen Goldey led to spearheading the development of an ES major and minor at Wofford. It debuts this fall. We're also renovating an old mill office building on a local creek for our field station.

(laneje@wofford.edu)

I joined the Ursinus Environmental Studies Program in 2002. I share in teaching our core ENV courses, including Issues in Environmental Studies and our Senior Seminar, as well as electives such as Conserving Biological Diversity, Ecosystem Management, Marine Mammal Conservation and Management, Advanced Environmental Policy Analysis, and Food, Society, and the Environment. My research interests include the implementation of federal biodiversity policy and the development of undergradaute environmental studies curricula. I am also involved in promoting and managing Ursinus College’s sustainability programs, including implementing the Presidents Climate Commitment for our campus and overseeing the Ursinus Organic Farm and Constructed Wetland projects.

(rwallace@ursinus.edu)

I have been at Colby since January of 1975 in the Department of Biology. I helped to create and continue to teach in the Environmental Studies Program. My teaching includes Environment and Society, Ecology courses, and a senior practicum in Environmental Science. I have chaired the Biology department, the Natural Sciences Division, the Interdisciplinary Studies Division, and have directed the Environmental Studies Program several times. One of my areas of research involves water quality and watershed studies.

(dhfirmag@colby.edu)

I teach environment and human values, U.S. and comparative environmental policy, and conservation and society. The college is developing a Center for Sustainable Environment, recently acquired Conservancy lands for a field station, and has a new Sustainability Dorm, so things are hopping. I am an environmental anthropologist. My research is on Andean human-environment relations and the cultural politics of conservation in Peru. I’ll be coming up from New Haven, Conn., where I’ll be spending my junior faculty leave.

(keely.maxwell@fandm.edu)

Since 2001, I’ve been working to develop, evaluate, and improve our community-based approach to environmental studies. This approach necessitates a unique set of logistics that I coordinate, including networking with community organizations to identify project needs, serving as a liaison between students and community organizations, ensuring that the community’s goals as well as our curricular/educational goals are being met, and providing the essential follow-up after the conclusion of the semester including dissemination of project results to audiences in the college and local community and beyond.

Get more information on service learning courses at Middlebury.

(dmunroe@middlebury.edu)

I just joined UMass Boston's Environmental Studies Program last fall after completing my PhD from Brown University in May of 2007. My research focuses on New England environments on the eve of contact with Europeans and during the Industrial Revolution.  So far, I have taught classes in Historic Environments, The Nature of Environmental Problems, Environmental Policymaking, and New England Environmental History, as well as co-taught a capstone seminar. As the faculty advisor to the Sustainability Club, I was pleased by how well the group tied in with the focus on Campus Sustainability in our capstone course last year.

(Ninian.Stein@umb.edu)

I’m a forest ecologist at a small liberal arts college where, after many years of offering a minor, we have just established a major in Environmental Studies and Sustainability. Major interests: ESS curricula and pedagogy, ecological landscaping and restoration initiatives on campus and in invaded forests, the invasive Norway maple, and windstorm/fire interactions in northern forests. My active teaching repertoire at the moment includes introductory ecology and evolution, environmental science, biogeography, forest ecology, plant taxonomy, and an occasional seminar on biological invasions.

(swebb@drew.edu)

I have been the director of the Environmental Studies Program at Washington College since its inception in 1996. Before that I was chair of the Biology Department for 13 years. I teach the introductory Environmental Studies course, and courses in conservation and wildlife management, birds of the Chesapeake Bay, environmental literature, marine biology, and parasitology. I lead summer courses to Bermuda and Ecuador. My research interests are in parasitology, specifically the opportunistic, potentially pathogenic, free living amoebas, and parasitic diseases of fish and shellfish.

(dmunson2@washcoll.edu)

I’ve been at Middlebury since 1990, when I was hired into a Political Science and Environmental Studies position. I teach two courses a year in support of Environmental Studies, typically Conservation and Environmental Policy (one of the required core courses for the Environmental Studies major and minor) and a senior seminar in American Environmental Politics, as well as courses on American politics. Since 1994, I have served for a total of seven years as director of the ES Program. My most recent book is The Green State and Policy Pathways: American Environmental Policy, 1990-2005 (MIT Press, 2008), written with David Sousa.

(klyza@middlebury.edu)

I’ve been teaching Marine, Fisheries and Environmental Studies classes at local colleges and universities since 1996 and with the University of Connecticut since 2006. I’m currently housed in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, although I’m not an economist. I teach Environmental Science, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy and Food, Population and Environment. I’m currently charged with developing environmental programming on the Avery Point regional campus of the University of Connecticut. There are existing programs (majors and minors) in Environmental Science and a nascent desire (among some) to add an Environmental Studies Program to the university offerings. My research interests encompass human dimensions approaches to understanding the dynamics of social-ecological systems with specific focus on fisheries co-management and the institutional dimensions of resilience in coastal systems.”

(syma.ebbin@uconn.edu)

I co-led (with John Lane) the development of Wofford College’s new Environmental Studies major and I am spearheading the development of a new, inquiry-based, introductory core course for biology majors. I was principal investigator for the NSF CCLI grant No. 0126788, “Seeing the Big Picture: Linking the Sciences and the Humanities,” and my interests include curricular reform efforts that foster disciplinary integration. I am a SENCER Leadership Fellow (see http://www.sencer.net), and in this role I regularly facilitate workshops on the development of issues-based courses, interdisciplinary teaching, and engaging students as partners in these efforts. I served on the Executive Council for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (see ASLE) and co-hosted, at Wofford College, ASLE’s biennial conference in 2007.

(goldeyes@wofford.edu)

I teach courses in environmental science and energy and have chaired our program for the last eight years; have been researching New England forests and energy use since the mid-1980s; am coauthor of Writing Successful Science Proposals (Yale University Press), second edition to be released in 2009; and am working on an environmental science textbook. I am always up for a discussion of how to better understand and teach on reducing one’s own environmental impact, from energy use or resource consumption, or in other ways.

(www.dartmouth.edu/~ajf)

(andy.friedland@dartmouth.edu)

I teach Environmental Politics and Policy and the Senior Capstone Sequence for Environmental Studies majors.  My research interests are state and local economic development and public policy.   I graduated from Middlebury in 1989. 

(bturner@skidmore.edu)

I teach labs for our introductory course Ecology and Evolution. This course serves a wide variety of students and is a popular science cognate for the Environmental Studies program. I am also interested in environmental education at the elementary school level and am a volunteer teacher with the Four Winds Program in the Starksboro, VT school. My research interests include the evolution of social behavior in ants and conservation genetics.
 
(backus@middlebury.edu)

I began teaching at Bucknell on the day the environmental program began in 1979.  I teach methods, GIS, food and the environment, human impact on the environment, cultural landscape, marine environment, landforms, etc.  Most of my research is on ancient human impact / geoarchaeology and GIS applications in civil rights, including environmental justice.   The Bucknell program has been expanding in staff and in breadth.  We are wrestling with ways to focus the major and unify the students as a group.  Therefore my chief interest at this conference is to learn about the design of synthesizing senior courses.

(marsh@bucknell.edu)

These past three years Candie Wilderman and I have led a Luce Foundation-funded semester-long program wherein we travel 5,000+ van miles with our students in a comparative assessment of the Chesapeake Bay and Lower Mississippi (i.e., coastal Louisiana) watersheds. My own research, of late, has been on energy policy, specifically utility deregulation and the commitment to renewable energy, hydrogen as a (poor choice for) transportation fuel, and neoliberal carbon offset trading.  The picture here was taken a month before the Iraq Invasion. They didn't listen.

(heiman@dickinson.edu)

I served as Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown from the time of its founding in 1978 until my retirement in 2004.  In 1985, I was one of the instigators for the NEES gatherings (when NE meant New England).  Now I'm a member of the RI Water Resources Board, the policy director for the RI Coalition for Water Security, and this semester I'm teaching our graduate service-learning seminar and directing our master's program.  Oh, and I raise excellent vegetables.

(harold_ward@brown.edu)

I arrived at the Environmental Program back in 1985.   I divide my time between administrative duties with the Natural Areas Center and as a member of the faculty of the Environmental Program.  The Center was established to advance education, research and outreach for the protection and management of natural areas and other conservation lands.  My research interests of late are with comparative landscape studies with a particular focus on conservation and stewardship initiatives on both public and private lands.  I offer coursework in environmental research methods, conservation biology, ecological restoration, and land conservation.  Some of the characters attending this affair were actually former students of mine. 

(rparadis@uvm.edu)

I teach in the English and American Literatures Department and the Environmental Studies Program at Middlebury. In the past few years I have also taught for Sea Education Association and the Williams-Mystic Program in Maritime Studies. My main interest is the literature of landscape and place, but I am increasingly focused on the literature of the sea. My academic areas of specialization are maritime literature and history, early modern drama and poetry, utopias and dystopias, ecocriticism, and literary and cultural theory. 

(dbrayton@middlebury.edu)

I have taught at UVM since 1972, when we initiated our university-wide interdisciplinary ENVS program.  Current courses include: Creating Environmentally-Sustainable Communities, Environmental Education, Educating & Interpreting for a Sustainable Future, Sustainability Field Studies, and International Natural Resource Issues (which has involved 18 travel-study courses to Latin America in the past decade focused on sustainabililty, ecotourism, & community-based conservation).  Three of the courses are service-learning courses.  Current research focuses on sustainability, and I'm working on a book entitled Sustainability Stories: A Field Guide to Sustainability in the Greater Burlington Area.

(Thomas.Hudspeth@uvm.edu)

For 13+ years I've served our Environmental Studies students as an advisor and resource person, helping with academic and life planning and mentoring. Courses, majors/minors, internships, study abroad, senior thesis ideas, summer and post-college jobs, etc. I'm the communications hub for opportunities on- and off-campus. Sometimes, especially lately as our student numbers have grown, I'm overwhelmed by all I could be doing to help them in college and to prepare to step out into the world. I'd like to talk with others about this. When I want to have a second job I teach creative nonfiction reading/writing courses on home and place-based writing. None lately. Too much fun outside.

(egetchel@uvm.edu)

(Heather_Leslie@brown.edu)