Contrary to the expectations of the “secularization hypothesis,” religion has not declined in the technological age, and thus remains a vital variable for understanding socio-ecological dilemmas.

I use qualitative social science methods, such as critical ethnography, case studies, environmental histories, and interviewing. I seek to understand how people derive and create meaning in relation to their surrounding environments. I explore how these meanings reflect, challenge, or resonate with received or novel religious teachings and institutions, and how such processes of meaning-making simultaneously create particular types of socio-natural places.

Specifically, I explore how small-scale, rural, and subsistence-based communities attribute noneconomic values to various aspects of the landscape, and how related perceptions and practices engage with, contribute to, or impede environmental degradation at the local, regional, state, and global levels.  This approach challenges the fact/ value distinction that places ecological science in the realm of quantitative and confirmable science, and values and morality in the voluntarist, subjective realm.