My research explores the intersection of the world’s religious traditions with environmental policy and practice.
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.
FEATURED TOPICSResearch, Articles & Public Lectures
Human Health and Ecological Resilience
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to more fully reveal injustices, inequities, and imbalances that contribute to climate change, ecological degradation, and economic instability that threaten our individual and collective well-being. This potent time invites us to consider questions like: How can we cultivate individual, collective, and ecological resilience in this unstable new reality? What lessons does the pandemic offer for addressing climate change and human health?
Race, Trauma, and Climate Change
Since at least the 1950s, scientists, policymakers, and oil companies have understood the threats of climate change to human society and the future of life on Earth. During this time, oil producers have engaged in obfuscation and disinformation campaigns to downplay the demonstrable hazards of continued fossil fuel production.
Toward a Feminist Care Ethic for Climate Change
Climate change is indisputably a feminist issue, and the tools of feminist analysis can provide valuable leverage in developing just and equitable responses to this existential challenge.
The Relational Spiral of Integral Ecology
How will the Integral Ecologist, this new “spiritual guide,” unite the conventionally disparate realms of science and spirit in practical action? What tools can the integral ecologist use to bring wisdom and insight to bear on increasingly complex environmental issues, interwoven with social justice, power relations, and legacies of domination so as to appear intractable?
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