Environmental Justice

Several members of our faculty write and teach in the area of environmental justice, which converges the study of ecology with cultural, economical, historical, philosophical and political processes. Students thus gain an interdisciplinary perspective of local, regional, and transnational movements that actively engage the recovery and promotion of sustainable alternatives to environmental destruction. Faculty involved in this area include:

• Mark Fowler specializes in environmental ethics, particularly the issues raised by ecological citizenship and the “Earth Rights” movement connecting human rights concerns to questions of sustainability.
• Andy Fisher focuses on public lands policy and resource conflicts in the American West, in addition to the controversies over Native American reserved rights to off-reservation subsistence and spiritual sites in the Pacific Northwest.
• Bill Fisher has worked with the indigenous Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon and the regional impacts of large-scale hydroelectric development and extractivist logging and mining; his current research focuses on the expansion of industrial soybean and cotton agriculture into the Amazonian region and new forms of governance involving territorial segregation of areas zoned for conservation and economic development.
• Regina Root engages the representation of ecological crisis and healing as part of a larger exploration of public memory in Latin(o) America.
• John Charles focuses on health ethics, with a particular emphasis upon making ethical decisions that relate to justice, rights and responsibilities and environmental health.