Ph.D. Yale University, 2003
My research and teaching interests focus on the globalization and internationalization of environmental problems, particularly in the fields of biodiversity conservation, environmental governance, and environmental security. My previous dissertation work, which I completed in 2003 from Yale University, was concerned with how biodiversity conservation is defined and implemented in developing countries. I spent over 3 years in field research in Viet Nam, a country that has been proclaimed a ‘biodiversity hotspot,’ mainly due to the discovery in the 1990s of several new mammals previously unknown to science. At the same time, Viet Nam has recently been named one of the top ten countries in the world that is losing its biodiversity the fastest. My dissertation looked at how property rights, forest use and access, migration and resettlement, and international biodiversity conservation intersected around protected forests in Vietnam. Different stakeholders had different governance models for resources based on social, cultural, and even moral definitions of biodiversity, and these ideas impacted their understandings of property and enforcement rights to resources. I have also been working more recently on questions of participation and democratization in natural resources management, and how these can be incorporated into global priority-setting for biodiversity conservation. I have been working on the manuscript for a book based on this research, tentatively titled “Beyond Biodiversity: Contests over Species, Land, and Environmental Governance in Vietnam.”
My second major area of research interest is in the area of migration, environmental change, and environmental security. Along with Chris Duncan, who will also be joining SGS and Religious Studies at ASU, I am working on a project titled "Environmental Consequences of State-Sponsored Rural-Rural Migration in Southeast Asia: A Comparison of Transmigration and Resettlement in Indonesia and Vietnam", funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Global Security and Sustainability. In 2004-2005 we are based in Asia, working with migrant communities in Vietnam and Indonesia, to investigate the role migration plays in household land-use decisions, as well as for writing up a book taking a comparative look at the impacts of migration policy on the environment and environmental security in Southeast Asia.
My final research interest is one that has developed from working in Vietnam, a place often associated in the US with war and environmental damage. I have a future plan to work on a book focused on the environmental consequences of the Vietnam War, and use that conflict to assess the state of knowledge and policy on conflicts, wars, and terrorism and their consequent effects on the natural environment. I have begun some research on this already, having participated in 2002 in the first joint US-Viet Nam conferences on studying the long tem effects of Agent Orange, which have included attendees from US government agencies and researchers from the US and Vietnam engaged in health and environmental studies of the war.
Before becoming an academic, I worked at the US Senate for Al Gore, and in the Clinton White House on environmental policy. More recently, I have done work with numerous NGOs working for sustainable development in Southeast Asia on such issues as mangrove reforestation, watershed management on the Mekong, and non-wood forest products use. I am not sure why I ended up working in Asia, as I was born in Texas and raised on a farm in Kansas. But I got the travel bug in college and have since visited all the continents except Antarctica, which I am unlikely to visit as I dislike cold environments.