Personal Statement

    As a geographer, I study human-environment interactions and how they vary over space and time, taking into account biophysical, political-economic, and cultural dimensions.

    My own research addresses the political economy and political ecology of development, international institutions, and resource use. I try to understand how global processes affect natural environments and human activities at the local level, and how local environmental changes and community, private-sector, and government actions influence global processes.

    My particular concerns are the relationships among biological variety, ecological sustainability, and social equity, and the effects of economic globalization and technological change on food security, biodiversity, and development. My doctoral dissertation on Biodiversity and the Contradictions of Green Developmentalism analyzes problems of valuing and conserving biological variety and distributing environmental benefits and burdens in a world-market economy.

    Other recent work concerns disputes about agricultural genetic resources and international conflicts about new biotechnologies, intellectual property rights to genes and organisms, and the challenges they pose for food security, the environment, and global governance.

    My teaching addresses these issues as well as the history, theory, and practice of development. Sustainable development efforts are constrained by centuries-old patterns of unequal resource exchange and new, global trade rules, while urgent survival needs and pressures to earn dollars appear to conflict with conservation goals. In sorting out these contradictions and searching for solutions, I look at different actors who speak for nature and for development: governments of the global "North" and "South," multilateral agencies, transnational corporations, NGOs, and local social movements and their international allies. What are their interests, what forms of power do they assert, on what basis do they claim authority, and how do they derive and interpret scientific knowledge?

    I am the author of Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean (Zed Press, 1991) and many articles on community and international development, gender, race, and social and environmental justice. I have studied the history of science with Thomas Kuhn, worked in urban community development in the U.S., and was a policy analyst for 10 years with Oxfam America. I have a BA in Biology (Vassar), an MA and PhD in Geography (University of California, Berkeley), and was the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before coming to Yale.

    My field research has taken me to South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. I am now working on a project on biodiversity, sustainable development, and indigenous people’s rights in Guyana. Another current research area theme is the theoretical and practical challenges of programs for payments for environmental services (PES) such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and watershed maintenance. I am interested in South and Southeast Asia and Africa as well as Latin America and the Caribbean and work with students who are from those regions or who have projects there.