Board / Staff
Sabine U. O’Hara (President, 2008-09) - Email
Sabine O’Hara’s affiliation with Ecological Economics goes back to the 1990s, when she served on the ISEE Committee on Curriculum and Training, and later as a founding member of the USSEE. She is president of Roanoke College in Virginia, and continues to be a practitioner and advocate of Ecological Economics in her work as scholar, educator and administrator. Born and educated in Germany, she received her formal education at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where she earned a doctorate in environmental economics. Dr. O’Hara serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Social Economics, the editorial board of the Review of Social Economy, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, the Economic Development Partnership and the Business Council; and just recently she completed a study on a quality of life based approach to development for the Roanoke region. As president elect, she will work to help position the USSEE to claim its timely and important leadership role in policy development at the national and international levels.
Karin Limburg (Past President, 2008)
Karin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She received her bachelor's degree at Vassar College (1977), master's degree in Systems Ecology under H.T. Odum at the University of Florida (1981), and a Ph.D. (1994) in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology under Simon Levin at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests are varied and include fisheries ecology, otolith microchemistry, watershed ecology, and ecological economics. She is the lead author of a book on the Hudson River ecosystem and co-editor of a book on the biodiversity and conservation of shads, a fish group of considerable economic importance around the world, and coeditor of a special issue of Ecological Economics on the ecology of ecosystem services. She has authored papers in Nature, Ecology, Ecological Economics and other journals in the fields of ecological economics, ecology, fisheries science, and particle physics. She has been a Member-at-Large on the USSEE Board since 2003.
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Valerie A. Luzadis (Secretary-Treasurer, 2007 - 2008)
Valerie Luzadis, another founder of USSEE and former member-at-large, is Associate Professor of Ecological Economics and Natural Resources Policy, in the Faculty of Forestry and Natural Resources Management at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She received a BS degree from Cornell University (1983) in Forest Science, MS from Cornell (1990) in Forest Science and Communications, and PhD (1997) from SUNY ESF in Natural Resources Economics and Policy. She was introduced to ecological economics when she began her PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the advisement of John Gowdy. She brings strong practical experience and leadership in the forestry community to the academic world having worked as both Cooperative Extension Agent and Director of Communications and Education for the Empire State Forest Products Association, as well as having held local, state, and national leadership positions in the Society of American Foresters. At ESF, her research focuses on the relationships between social, economic, and ecological systems from the applied context of decision-making in small, rural communities to the global social, economic, and philosophical foundations that influence human interaction with ecosystems. In addition to teaching and research, she consults regularly with groups such as The Nature Conservancy and The Wildlife Conservation Society to advise and facilitate community-based conservation efforts.
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Joshua Farley (Member-at-Large, 2007-08)
Josh Farley an Assistant Professor in Community Development and Public Administration and an associate of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics (GIEE) at the University of Vermont. He has a very interdisciplinary academic background, with degrees in biology, international affairs and neoclassical economics. The former degrees inoculated him against indoctrination in the latter. He returns to the USSEE board after a two-year hiatus. His major contributions to ecological economic include a textbook co-authored with Herman Daly (Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications), and an accompanying workbook on problem-based approaches to ecological economics co-authored with Jon Erickson and Herman Daly. He served as executive director of the UMD Institute for Ecological Economics, working with ISEE President-Elect Peter May to set up a workshop/field-course in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest assessing reforestation as a watershed management tool. At UVM he has collaborated with David Batker, Filipino NGOs and local Filipino government on a workshop/field-course studying the conversion of mangrove ecosystems to shrimp aquaculture in Palawan, Philippines. He is also involved in a number of local projects (several in collaboration with Bob Costanza), ranging from working with local government, businesses and NGOs and others to redesign and relaunch Burlington’s local complementary currency to working with the Vergennes planning commission to elicit from Vergennes' citizens a shared vision of a sustainable and desirable future.
Trista Maj Patterson (Member-at-Large, 2007-08)
Trista Patterson is an ecological economist with the U.S. Forest Service. She has been a member of the Society since the ISEE meeting in Santiago, Chile in 1998. The insight, creativity, and energy from other ecological economists buoyed her own efforts throughout that year, and she has not missed a national or international meeting since. The doctoral and EE certificate program at the University of Maryland, a 3 year lecture/research residency at University of Siena, Italy in EE, and the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program (2004-2006), have also had a strong influence on her current work. She was an active student member, and now takes a place on the USSEE board. She sees the Society becoming increasingly important in 1) targeting aspects of those concepts that are getting lost in (mainstream) translation, 2) engaging with our ideal vision of the Society, that we make more of each gain, and 3) drawing others to our continued success.
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Bernardo Aguilar-Gonzalez (Member-at-Large, 2008-09) Bernardo is a Faculty member of the Cultural and Regional Studies Program in Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona. Born in Costa Rica, he has 14 years of experiential teaching work in the fields of Sustainable Development Studies, Ecological Economics, Environmental Law and Latin American Studies. During these years he has focused his research and service projects in the areas of radical pedagogy, ecological economic valuation and “Integrative Indicators of Ecosystem Health” as applied to small community-managed and protected areas/ecosystems. He led a team that created in 1995 the indicator known as the Holistic Ecosystem Health Indicator (HEHI), a metric that integrates ecological, social and interactive indicators. The HEHI has been applied in private conservation initiatives in Central America, the Caribbean and lately in collaborative conservation in the Colorado Plateau. During the last 6 years his work has focused in the U.S.-Mexico border and Latin America regions, in the areas of political ecology and environmental justice. He holds graduate degrees in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Georgia (M.S., Fulbright Scholar) and in Law from the University of Costa Rica (J.D. and L.L.M.). He has been awarded several scholarships and grants from different programs including Fulbright, US-AID Caribbean Basin Program, the EPA P3 Program and the Community Based Collaborative Research Consortium. He has published one book, several book chapters, magazine, journal and newspaper articles, and scientific reviews. He has presented his work at over 30 international meetings. Between 2005 and 2007, he has served in the board of the USSEE (United States Society for Ecological Economics) as an at-large member and since the beginning of 2006 he became the society’s newsletter editor. The society created an award with his name in 2003 to recognize his inspirational work motivating students to work in ecological economics.
Jonathan M. Harris (Member-at-Large, 2008-09)Jonathan M. Harris is Director of the Theory and Education Program at the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute. He is the author of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics: A Contemporary Approach (2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2006); co-author of Macroeconomics in Context; co-author of Environmental and Social Issues in Economics (Encyclopedia of Earth, 2006); co-editor of New Thinking in Macroeconomics: Social, Institutional and Environmental Perspectives (Edward Elgar 2003); and of the Frontier Issues in Economic Thought volumes A Survey of Sustainable Development, A Survey of Ecological Economics and Human Well-Being and Economic Goals (Island Press, 2001; 1995; 1997). He is also editor of Rethinking Sustainability: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions (University of Michigan Press, 2000). His current research focuses on the implications of large-scale environmental problems, especially global climate change, for macroeconomic theory and policy.
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Inês Lima de Azevedo (Student Member-at-Large, 2007-08)
Inês Lima de Azevedo is a PhD Student and Assistant Researcher at the Climate Decision Making Center and at the Carnegie Electricity Industry Center, in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy of Carnegie Mellon University. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2004) as well as a Master’s degree in Engineering Policy and Management of Technology (2006) from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Portugal. In 2001 she received a scholarship fund to the study of flow material analysis for the Portuguese Economy, for the Mechanics Department of the IST, Lisbon, Portugal. She was in Denmark for an Erasmus Program in 2002, working mainly in European energy related issues. Her research interests are focused on policy problems in which environmental, economical, and technical issues as well as individual choices play a central role. Present application areas are the role of technological innovation and more efficient end-use technologies adoption by consumers on energy conservation and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. This includes questions as: are more efficient technologies enough to promote sustainable consumption and energy/material savings? Other research interests include: demand side energy policies; carbon trading and alternative schemes for carbon emissions reduction; models for energy demand; behavioral economics and consumer choices towards energy; carbon/energy reduction supply curves.
Policy Committee
Brian Czech, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Stephen DeCanio, University of California Washington Center
Neha Khanna, Binghamton University
Skip Laitner, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
*Richard Norgaard, University of California-Berkeley
Matthias Ruth, University of Maryland
David Stern, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
*USSEE representative to American Institute of Biological Sciences,
http://www.aibs.org/
Secretariat
Marsha Kopan
(414)453-0030
E-Mail
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