Center for Humans and Nature

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