Center for Humans and Nature

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. First, in 2010 and 2011, Brown will be a key member of the Humans, Nature, and Democracy: Ecological Political Economy project. The principal product of Brown’s work emerging from this project will be the completion of a co-edited and/or co-coauthored volume on governance of an economic system which is constructed in light of scientific perspectives on ecology, evolution, energy systems, and an ethics of respect for nature.

Second, in 2011, Brown will work with Curt Meine within the Advancing the Land Ethic project. In cooperation with CHN Fellow Alexandre Poisson, a selected inventory and overview of Leopold’s writings on economics will be produced. This anthology will include those who influenced Leopold in his thinking on economics, as well as those whom he influenced. This anthology will be published on the CHN website (subject to the constraints of copyright laws), with an introduction synthesizing, providing context for, and explaining the significance of Leopold’s contribution to this field.

As a Senior Fellow in 2009, Brown participated in CHN-sponsored or co-sponsored research meetings/workshops in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Florence, Italy. Brown also presented at a series of CHN-sponsored lectures at three venues in South Carolina and three venues in the New York City region. Additionally, Brown’s research and work with CHN was featured on Chicago’s “Worldview” NPR program.

About Dr. Brown

Professor Brown’s teaching, research, and service are concerned with ethics, governance, and the protection of the environment. His appointments at McGill are in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences.

He was the first full time Director of the McGill School of Environment. The McGill School of Environment is involved in building programs with McGill’s Faculties of Arts, Science, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, as well as Religious Studies, Law, Engineering, Management, and Medicine.

Before coming to McGill he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland’s graduate School of Public Affairs. While at the University of Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, as well as the School of Public Policy itself. Professor Brown established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs to operate not only at the University’s College Park campus, but also at Maryland’s Department of the Environment, and at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

He has held numerous administrative positions within the University of Maryland System. He has taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Washington, and at St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the early 1970s, he was Visiting Fellow at Battelle Seattle Research Center and Assistant Vice President for Research Operations at The Urban Institute.