USSEE Board and Staff

Sabine U. O’Hara (President, 2008-09) - Email

Dr. Sabine O’Hara is Executive Director of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and Vice President of the Institute of International Education. She is a respected researcher, author and administrator known for her work in global higher education and sustainable development. The author of two books and numerous articles, book chapters and research reports, she has lectured and conducted research around the globe and has developed and taught undergraduate, graduate and continuing education courses on topics like sustainable economic development, economics and ethics,  cultural perspectives on valuation, and stakeholder processes.

Before joining CIES/IIE Dr. O’Hara was the tenth president of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and held faculty and administrative appointments at Concordia College in Moorhead MN, at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and as visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

O’Hara serves on the Board of Directors for several national and international organizations, including as president of the United States Society for Ecological Economics, the Association for Social Economics. A native of Germany, O’Hara completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Gottingen, where she also earned a doctorate in environmental economics.

Jon Erickson (President-Elect)

Jon Erickson is Associate Professor of Ecological Economics at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. Jon is a founding member of the USSEE and has served on boards of both the U.S. and International Societies for EE. For the USSEE he organized and chaired the Second Biennial Meeting in Saratoga Springs, NY, helped to establish the biennial Herman Daly Award, co-edited the first book project from a USSEE conference, and served on various panels and reviews at subsequent meetings. For the ISEE he served as Treasurer, as liaison with the USSEE, on the conference committee for the Montreal meeting, and helped with the creation of new regional societies. Jon is from a new generation of ecological economists that emerged as the transdiscipline found roots in academic institutions in the 1990s. As a doctoral student at Cornell University (Ph.D. ’97), Jon designed his own EE program by jointly studying natural resource economics and forest ecology. He started his career as an assistant professor in one of the first advertised positions in the U.S. for an ecological economist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1997-2002) where he helped establish one of the first doctoral programs in EE. At the University of Vermont he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in EE; co-supervises a graduate certificate program in EE; participates in the ongoing development of online EE teaching resources (metacourses.org); and leads a research program on both the theoretical development of EE and applied work on human health, regional sustainable development, land and biodiversity conservation, watershed planning, forest management, climate change, and renewable energy. His work has been published as 4 books, 47 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and over 100 conference papers, research reports, press articles, and interviews; presented as invited lectures and with over 40 collaborators at professional meetings throughout the U.S. and in over 15 countries; and supported by over $2.2 million in research funds. His work on problem-based learning in EE was published with Farley and Daly in a workbook with Island Press, and recognized by Vermont’s inaugural service-learning award. He is also past president of the Adirondack Research Consortium and currently serves as board member of the ARC, trustee of the Conservation and Research Foundation, executive editor of the Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies, and editorial board member of Environmental Policy and Governance.

Robert Richardson (Secretary-Treasurer)

Robert Richardson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University. He is a core faculty member with MSU’s Environmental Science and Policy Program, and also serves on the Program Advisory Board. He is also affiliated with the Center for Advanced Study of International Development and the African Studies Center. His research focuses on sustainable development, specifically with the sustainable use of natural resources and their role in poverty reduction. He has studied the economic impact of climate change in protected areas in the western USA, Belize, and Australia. He has completed several studies of the economic benefits of wilderness areas in the western USA, including the values of ecosystem services. He is presently involved in a project that examines the role of sustainable tourism development in poverty reduction strategies in Zambia. He teaches courses in sustainable development and environmental economics at Michigan State University.  Dr. Richardson has worked in southern and western Africa, Central America, and in the South Pacific. He has completed several consultancies for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on models of adaptation to climate change. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Colorado State University and a Master’s degree from New York University. His published work has appeared in Ecological Economics, Review of Regional Studies, and the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.

Bernardo Aguilar-Gonzalez (Member-at-Large, 2008-09)

Bernardo is the Executive Director of Fundación Neotrópica, a Costa Rica based environmental NGO dedicated to the promotion of sustainable community based natural resource management. He is an adjunct faculty at Northern Arizona University and the UICR (International University of Costa Rica). Born in Costa Rica, he has 17 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. His work focuses today in the application of political ecology models in marginal areas of Costa Rica. His work has also focused in the U.S.-Mexico border and other 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 is currently a doctoral candidate at he Natural Sciences for development PhD program at UNA-UNED-TEC in Costa Rica. 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.

David Ervin (Member-at-Large)

David Ervin is a Professor of Economics, Professor of Environmental Management, and Fellow in the Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices at Portland State University. He teaches the economics of sustainability, business environmental management, ecosystem services, and global environmental issues. During 2001-08, he was Coordinator of Academic Sustainability Programs at Portland State University. His past appointments include Professor and Head of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University, Director of Policy Studies for the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture, Chief of Resource Policy Branch in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His current research program includes voluntary business environmental management, university-industry research relationships, risk management of transgenic crops, and green technology. He recently directed three multidisciplinary projects: Ecosystem Service Changes and Sustainability from Dam Removals; Public Goods and University-Industry Relationships in Agricultural Biotechnology, and; Oregon Business Decisions for Environmental Management. Selected recent publications include “Research Choice and Finance in University Bioscience,” Southern Economic Journal (forthcoming), “Motivations for Voluntary Environmental Management” in the Policy Studies Journal, “Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics: A Synthesis,” in Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics, “Towards an Ecological Systems Approach in Public Research for Environmental Regulation of Transgenic Crops” in Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment, and "Precaution as an Approach to Technology Development: The case of transgenic crops" in Science, Technology and Human Values. He currently chairs the National Research Council’s Committee “Impact of Biotechnology on Farm Economics and Sustainability.” He has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Land Economy at Cambridge University in 1986-87 and 2008. His consulting includes work for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Commission, and the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

Paula Swedeen (Member-at-Large)

Paula Swedeen runs her own environmental consulting firm specializing in establishing payment for ecosystem service mechanisms and conservation of endangered species. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Concentration in Ecological Economics from the Union Institute and University, a Masters in Political Science and Environmental Studies from Western Washington University, and a B.S. in Biology from Indiana University. She has nineteen years experience working on ecosystem management and wildlife conservation issues for both the public and non-profit sectors. Projects include long-term landscape planning for Northern Spotted Owls and Marbled Murrelets, design of ecologically-based forest restoration thinning projects, ecosystem service valuation in the Puget Sound, the Mississippi River Delta, and the Oregon Coast, development of an ecosystem services framework to improve protection of coastal resources in California, ecological footprint analysis of potential expansion of marine aquaculture in U.S. waters, development of forest carbon markets, and development of a framework for water quality trading based on Forest Stewardship Council certification requirements. Her main goals in her work are to expand understanding of the interrelationship between ecological and economic well-being and to create tools that facilitate the maintenance and restoration of resilient ecosystems.

Ida Kubiszewski (Student Member-at-Large)

Ida Kubiszewski is a co-founder and former-Managing Editor the Encyclopedia of Earth, an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. Written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work, it provides a much-needed peer reviewed, trusted source of information for students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as the general public.

Ida is currently working as the Managing Editor for a new magazine/journal hybrid called Solutions, scheduled to launch in 2009. Solutions will be an outlet for discussions focusing on solutions to the complex problems we are now facing in the context of whole systems design for a sustainable and desirable future. She is also the Managing Editor of The Year in Ecological Economics, an annual publication of the New York Academy of Sciences, providing in-depth reviews of the most timely and important issues in the field of Ecological Economics.

Ida received her B.A. in Astronomy and Physics from Boston University and her M.A. in Energy and Environmental Analysis through the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies also at Boston University. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. through the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.

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

Secretariat
Marsha Kopan
(414)453-0030
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