Bernardo Aguilar-Gonzalez

Cultural and Regional Studies
Ecological Economics, Latin American Studies and Environmental Law
Prescott College

Biographical sketch: 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.

Candidate Statement: My work as a past USSEE board member and newsletter editor has taught me important lessons. As an environmentalist, I share the concern that our ideas have been displaced from the main stage of public discussion. Working with other environmental professional societies has helped our society and the ideas it represents in keeping the discussion going. Nevertheless, in the United States, we remain an area of scientific inquiry and policy discussion that is fairly concentrated in certain income and ethnic/cultural strata. Our efforts in this direction are still young and require a continued commitment to maintain our focus on topics and issues that attract a broader audience in the U.S. As partners in a changing political climate, we should help the United States retake hemispheric leadership in the discussion of topics such as climate change and grassroots-based conservation. We also need a stronger focus on the social, educational and teleological aspects of Ecological Economics. In addition to expanding our networking with other professional societies, we should make a more concerted effort to establish, as a complement to the work being published in academic journals, more discussion forums that generate opinion pieces which can reach the daily media with more ease. As a post-normal trans-discipline, I feel that this effort lies at the core of the normative nature of Ecological Economics. This recognition of our identity would aid us in organizational efforts where I see the need to emphasize a strong and directed effort to increase recruitment of a broader professional and student body. Further, I feel our organization should increase its vitality as a community through stronger efforts in promoting the information and networking services that the society offers as a clearinghouse and networking center for professional positions, development funds, sharing of educational experiences and other common resources. This would stimulate our community to integrate, beyond biennial meetings, into joint efforts that can have a broader impact than the focused work of the amazing individual organizations that we already have at several universities.