Senior Scholars
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Ph.D.
Senior Scholar
Dr. Ingrid Stefanovic is a Professor of Philosophy and former Founding Director of the Centre for Environment at the University of Toronto. Her research and publications explore the meaning of sense of place, as well as how values affect environmental policy development and decision-making. She teaches courses in environmental philosophy, environmental decision-making, and applied ethics (including climate ethics and water ethics.) She is a former Executive Co-Director of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy and currently co-chairs the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Network at the Environmental Design Research Association. READ MORE
Nina-Marie Lister, M.Sc. Pl.
Senior Scholar
Professor Nina-Marie Lister is tenured Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto and Visiting Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A Registered Professional Planner (MCIP, RPP) with a background in ecology and environmental planning, she is the founding principal of plandform, a creative studio practice exploring the relationship between landscape, ecology, and urbanism. Professor Lister’s research, teaching, and practice focus on the confluence of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes within contemporary metropolitan regions. READ MORE
J. Ronald Engel, Ph.D.
Since the beginnings of CHN, the “spiritual” or “faith” dimensions of democratic ecological citizenship have been a central preoccupation of Engel’s work. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on the role of what legal scholar Daniel Elazar calls the “theo-political” concept of covenant in founding and sustaining strong spiritual cultures of conservation and democratic governance. This work has been well received by those engaged in the ongoing dialogue on global ethics, and by scholars in the field of international environmental law. In 2010, Engel will seek to bring his research and writing on this topic to completion in a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Making the Earth Covenant.” READ MORE
Juliet Schor, Ph.D.
Senior Scholar
While a Senior Scholar at the Center for Humans and Nature, Juliet Schor will be working on the Practicing Plenitude project. The project will consist of commissioning in-depth papers, with primary research, based on six major themes of her recently published book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. The purpose of the project is to understand more about the dimensions of an alternative lifestyle and economy so that they can be diffused throughout communities and applied more widely in our society. The six major themes are: changing patterns of time use, high-productivity small-scale urban and suburban food provisioning, the growth of economies of local sharing and collaboration, local self-reliance networks, the open source hardware movement, and small scale fabrication technology and its use by inner city youth. READ MORE
Peter G. Brown, Ph.D.
Senior Scholar
Peter Brown’s research on the nature, size and governance of the human economy is at the very heart of the concerns of the Center for Humans and Nature. There is no room to doubt the direct connection between the vast changes in the world’s economic activity since World War II and the simultaneous increased threats to biodiversity, ecosystem health, and numerous other global functions. Rethinking, redirecting and re-governing the world’s economy is an essential component of achieving the kind of world envisioned by CHN. As a Senior Fellow with CHN, Peter Brown’s work will be synthetic or hybrid in nature, working closely with CHN projects over the next two years. READ MORE
Laura Dassow Walls, Ph.D.
As a Senior Scholar with the Center for Humans and Nature Laura was able to concentrate on completing the bulk of the first draft of Passage to Cosmos, which was partly inspired by the meetings led by Strachan Donnelly. The gatherings he drew together of engaged and committed scholars from the sciences, philosophy, economics, literature and religion echoed in many ways the approach to learning and activism modeled by Humboldt himself, who saw the Cosmos as an evolving narrative continually shaped by the interactions of humans and nature, giving humans both the freedom and the responsibility to enact a cosmopolitan respect for all peoples, and a commitment to education as the republic’s most important national trust. READ MORE
Bill Vitek, Ph.D.
As a Senior Scholar with the Center for Humans and Nature I worked on two projects: 1) A co-edited collection, with Wes Jackson, titled The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (University Press of Kentucky, 2008). The collection contains a number of essays from authors currently, or at one time, associated with the Center. The second project was a collection of essays titled Post-Carbon Sense. It remains unfinished, although one essay (“These Revolutionary Times”) has been published and reprinted in a number of small publications. READ MORE
Past Senior Scholars
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