Dear ISEE Members,

The election for a new group of ISEE officers and nominating committee members for 2016-2018 is now under way. Voting will run from now until Monday, May 11th at midnight. (Edit: please scroll down for candidate bios.)

Yesterday you should have received an invitation to vote and information about how to do so. If you did not receive such an invitation, please check with Allen Thompson, ISEE treasurer at Allen.Thompson@oregonstate.edu, to make sure you are currently a member of ISEE. If you are a current member and entitled to vote, please email Henry Cafaro at 53611@psdschools.org to get information on how to do so. As you will see, the ballot includes links to the candidates’ biographies.

Thanks for taking the time to vote! Thanks as well to the current nominating committee for fielding such an outstanding slate of candidates, and to the candidates themselves for their willingness to serve.

Best wishes,

Phil Cafaro, ISEE President

Candidate Bios:

VP

Allen Thompson
I’m an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University, where I am Director of Graduate Studies and co-director (with Robert Figueroa and Barbara Muraca) of the OSU Program for Ethics, Society, and the Environment. With faculty strength on environmental issues, our College of Liberal Arts offers an MA in Applied Ethics, an MA in Environmental Arts & Humanities, and a PhD in the History of Science.
An ISEE member since 2006, I have regularly attended and presented work at our annual summer meetings (including a plenary alongside P. Cafaro and H. Rolston in 2013) and group sessions at the APA. Elected Treasurer in 2013, I have served ISEE in a variety of ways including organizing sessions for the Central APA, registering members, managing our financial resources, and filing paperwork for our newly acquired 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. I have also worked to strengthen relations between ISEE and the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, continuing to discuss collaborative projects with my OSU colleague and IAEP co-director, Barbara Muraca, and the editor-in-chief of the IAEP journal, Environmental Philosophy, Ted Toadvine.
My research has focused on exploring different conceptions of moral responsibility for anthropogenic environmental transformations, with an emphasis on climate change and novel ecosystems, approached with a virtue-theoretic orientation.  I have talked about loss & damage, adaptation, and climate justice at UNFCCC official side-events and discussed other issues of climate ethics on NPR’s Philosophy Talk. I’ve published articles in Climatic Change; Ethics, Place, & Environment; Journal of Value Inquiry; Ethics & the Environment; Journal of Agriculture & Environmental Ethics; and The Trumpeter. I have co-authored chapters with Bryan Norton, Andrew Light, Eric Higgs, and others including an atmospheric scientist, restoration ecologists, a geographer, and a paleoecologist. With Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, I co-edited Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future (MIT 2012) and I am presently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics with Stephen Gardiner.
Finally, I am on the Editorial Boards of Environmental Ethics and Ethics, Policy & Environment and I serve as Book Review Editor for Environmental Ethics. Before landing my first tenure-track job I lived for three years off the grid in a yurt at 7,500 feet, five miles from a paved road in rural southwest Colorado, sharing the land with black bear, beaver, migrating elk, and a mountain lion. My webpage can be found at: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~thompsoa/AllenThompson/home.html

Andrew Light
I am University Professor and Director of the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy at George Mason University. I live in Washington, D.C., and have been active for fifteen years in the environmental NGO and policy communities.  Since 2013, I have served in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor and India Counselor to the Special Envoy on Climate Change, and Senior Climate Adviser in Secretary Kerry’s Office of Policy Planning, at the U.S. Department of State.  I will return to Mason by the end of this year.  While my own academic and public work has primarily been on restoration ecology, urban sustainability, and climate change, I have devoted most of my career to advancing the field of environmental ethics as a necessary part of sound environmental policy.  As a prospective member of ISEE’s leadership, I would use my experience in and outside of the academy, and around the world, to work toward expanding the reach of our field to create new opportunities, especially for the next generation of younger scholars.  This organization should work hard to cement our place in the broader discipline and in the academy.  But when the world is facing tremendously challenging environmental problems, we should also be at the table, shaping and influencing decisions and institutions that impact us all.  In addition to my public work in service to these ends, I am a founding editor of the journal Ethics, Policy, and Environment (formerly Philosophy & Geography, co-edited now with Ben Hale and in its 18th volume), have organized 17 major international conferences or workshops, and have edited or co-edited 15 books, including Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice (MIT, 2003), and Environmental Pragmatism (Routledge, 1996).  I also deeply value traditional normative theory in environmental ethics, as is evident from my co-edited textbook with Holmes Rolston, Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 2003), and my co-authored book Environmental Values (Routledge, 2008), with John O’Neill and Alan Holland.  Since moving to Washington in 2008, most of my life not spent with my family has been focused on mobilizing international resources for clean energy development, and enhancing resilience to climate change in India, for the 300 million people living in energy poverty and at risk of extreme climatic disruption.  This past January this work culminated with the launch of 15 new bilateral climate and clean energy initiatives between the U.S. and India, including over $1 billion in support of India’s clean energy expansion, new programs on air quality to address the worst urban air pollution in the world, and a data sharing initiative to help local planners predict and respond to extreme climate impacts.

Secretary

Aline Ramos
I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada), specializing in Ethics (virtue theory) and Medieval Philosophy. I have worked with the International Society for Environmental Ethics since 2012, when I started out as a web assistant, and focused on the international aspect of ISEE, recruiting members and representatives from outside the USA. In August 2014, I became ISEE’s webmaster and listserv manager. I was born and raised in Brazil; I have an M.A. in Ethics & Society (Fordham U., 2010), with a focus on bioethics, and I am particularly interested in how intellectual akrasia interferes with public policy and particularly affects developing countries, including my home country. My CV is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/alinemramos/cv

Clement Loo
I am an assistant professor in the department of Environmental Studies and coordinator of the Sustainability Leadership for the Future program at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Prior to this I was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow within the College of the Environment and a member of the Environmental Think Tank at Wesleyan University. My research focuses on food justice; particularly as it relates to climate change adaptation and sustainable development. I am also interested in stakeholder consultation and its potential for improving the robustness of research and environmental assessment. I am currently completing a monograph, co-authored with Robert A. Skipper, examining the role of current agricultural and trade systems in the worsening global obesity crisis. I also do my best to spend as much time outside as possible – I am an avid camper, hiker, and am learning how to be a beekeeper.

Newsletter Editor

Matt Ferkany
(No bio for him, since he’s running unopposed, but feel free to email him if you’d prefer to have one.)

Treasurer

Sarah Wright
I am an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.  While my main research focus is on normative epistemology, I am also interested in environmental ethics, particularly in considering the epistemic virtues that we might exhibit in our interactions with the natural world.  I have also published an article on the value of beta-diversity in Ethics and the Environment.  I am a faculty member of our university’s Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, which offers an interdisciplinary certificate in environmental ethics at both the undergraduate levels.  I often teach our undergraduate/graduate environmental ethics class, and I am fortunate to be on the schedule to teach this class at UGA’s Costa Rica campus in the spring of 2016. I organized the Georgia Philosophical Society meetings for the last two years and served as that society’s vice president and president. I have participated in the last two ICEE meetings in Colorado (my home state) and look forward to participating in many future ICEE events.
For my complete CV, see the link on my UGA webpage: https://phil.franklin.uga.edu/directory/sarah-wright

Robert Melchior Figueroa
I am an associate professor of environmental philosophy at Oregon State University, where I also hold the inaugural Engaged Scholar in Residence office at the Center for Latin@ Studies and Engagement. My central engaged research project involves Adelante Mujeres, a Latina grassroots organization centered on restorative justice and reconciliation for Latina women and girls. I’m building upon my general contributions to the philosophy of environmental justice which have been my focus for over two-decades. My efforts have been to extend and refine the range of meanings and activism in environmental justice through interdisciplinary dimensions of environmental justice studies, broadly construed. I’ve coined “environmental identity” and “environmental heritage” in the environmental justice frame, and demonstrated the philosophical insights of these concepts in several research projects and multiple case studies to buffet recognition justice and restorative justice in environmental justice studies. I direct the Environmental Justice Project under the Center for Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas, where I was associate professor of philosophy for seven years. In that time I organized the Varieties of Environmental Justice conference, directed the new PhD program for three years, and served as associate chair for one year. Prior to that I was the first purely (sans department) interdisciplinary tenure track professor at Colgate University, where I served as assistant professor of environmental studies and university studies. My affiliations included environmental studies (which I also coordinated), peace and conflict studies, university studies, and Africana and Latin American studies (which I chaired for a year). I was also able to produce several different environmental justice courses which were inspired from my opportunity to teach the nation’s first curriculum-introduction philosophy course on (and even entitled) Environmental Justice. I co-edited Science and Other Cultures: Issues in the Philosophies of Science and Technology (Routledge 2003), with Sandra Harding. The book was the culmination of a three-year project between the NSF and the APA, which Sandra and I co-directed. Between, 2000-2001, I organized over a dozen APA panels across the three divisions by working with the APA executive director and the divisional organizers. I have also continued working with the NSF since that time, particularly as a panel reviewer and around environmental justice and engineering. Some of my recent projects include The Uluru Project, working on reconciliation and joint-Park management between indigenous and non-indigenous communities; The Mesa Verde Project, working on environmental heritage and transdisciplinary field scholarship in the Mesa Verde Region; and as a new faculty to OSU, I am part of the directorship of the Program for Ethics, Society, and the Environment (PESE) with my new colleagues, Allen Thompson and Barbara Muraca. I am on editorial board of Environmental Philosophy, and I guest-edited its special issue on Ecotourism and Environmental Justice. My publications have include numerous chapter contributions, and articles in the leading environmental philosophy journals, as well as the top geography journal and archival publishers like the Australian National Museum Press. My current work is on Latin@s and EJ, climate refugees and political refugee resettlement and EJ, critical disability studies and EJ with focus on environmental identity and autism, and the completion of my text, Environmental Justice as Environmental Ethics: A New Introduction (Routledge) as well as my book Extending Environmental Justice: Beyond Equity and Identity. For a complete cv, https://oregonstate.academia.edu/RobertMelchiorFigueroa/CurriculumVitae

Nominating Committee

John Nolt
John Nolt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee.  His research is centered on philosophical logic and environmental and intergenerational ethics, areas in which he has published seven books—most recently Environmental Ethics for the Long Term: An Introduction, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2015.  A long-time environmental activist, he has for the past decade chaired UT’s Committee on the Campus Environment, which advises the administration on environmental matters.  He was President of the UT Faculty Senate in 2008-9, and President of the statewide Tennessee University Faculty Senates in 2009-10.   Much of his recent work is on climate and energy ethics.  CV available at:  http://web.utk.edu/~nolt/

Megs Gendreau
I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) where I teach courses in Political Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy, Ethics, and 19th & 20th Century European Philosophy. Before taking this position, I was a Mellon Fellow in Environmental Studies and Philosophy at Bowdoin College and received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. My research is primarily on issues of environmental injustice, with a particular focus on challenges facing communities in the inland areas of Southern California. My current work also focuses on questions of value and agency preservation in the face of community upheaval caused by climate change. In my free time I’m a masters swimmer and British Detective Novel enthusiast. My website is www.megs.gendreau.com

Ken Shockley
I am Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Sustainability Academy at University at Buffalo – SUNY, where I developed the university’s first environmental ethics course.  Along with courses in environmental ethics and sustainability I teach a number of undergraduate and graduate courses in practical and theoretical ethics. Most recently my work has focused on the challenges the environmental and social instability likely to result from climate change pose for environmental ethics and policy. I have also pursued a range of interdisciplinary work, including collaborative work on the moral, social, cultural values associated with ecological restoration, the challenges facing interdisciplinary environmentally-oriented research teams, and the ethical dimensions of stakeholder participation. My work has been supported by National Science Foundation, Fulbright, the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute, and the Research Foundation of the State of New York. Publications include essays in Environmental Values, Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy, and the Environment, Philosophical Studies, the Journal of Social Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Regions and Cohesions, Dialectica, and contributions in collections published by MIT, Cornell, and Peter Lang.  I sit on the boards of Environmental Ethics and Ethics, Policy, and Environment. Before teaching at UB I taught at Barnard College and, while a Peace Corps Volunteer, lectured philosophy at Chancellor College of the University of Malawi.  I occasional serve as a tour guide at a local nature preserve, something for which I truly wish I had more time, and I am a graduate of NOLS outdoor educator course. I have been a member of ISEE for many years, and have presented papers at ISEE annual meetings and at the ISEE/APA meetings on several occasions. For my complete cv, see https://sites.google.com/site/kennethshockley/

Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer
I grew up in Central New York with summers in Ohio near Cleveland to work on my cousin’s farm and studied later at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, Yale College, and University of Chicago.  Toward the end of my 20s, I began working on a wonderful Head Start family center system in Chicago. It changed my view of education, while allowing me to loop back around to my early childhood –my mother started the first Head Start school in rural New York, near Aurora.  My first faculty job was at Colorado College, followed by helping build and accredit American University of Sharjah, now a university globally of note.  I shared a joint appointment between AUS and LeMoyne College, where I learned about Jesuit education as an atheist.  Finally, I came to Case Western Reserve University five years ago where I serve as the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics developing ethics learning across the undergraduate curriculum and the work environment.  I am committed to anthroponomy as a project that traces back to the Renaissance –earlier than that to Plato– and involves the project of the Enlightenment: humankind’s emancipation from its self-incurred oppression. I understood my early years as training in the philosophy that would allow us to advance as a species in this modern sense. The poetic twist is that I find much of my insight through joining reason with intuition, words with song, the body with the mind, and solitude with dialogue and community.  Besides numerous articles on environmental maturity, human rights, common humanity, Nussbaum’s biocentrism, citizen apathy, higher court citizenship, and several around mass extinction cascades, I have authored The Ecological Life: Discovering Citizenship and a Sense of Humanity and its sequel, the multi-genre, Solar Calendar and Other Ways of Marking Time.  I co-edited Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future and was on the research team for We Are All Explorers: Learning and Teaching with Reggio Principles in Urban Settings.  I am currently writing a book on planetary citizenship and localism called The Anthroponomists.
For more information, please see:  http://philosophy.case.edu/faculty/jeremy-david-bendik-keymer/

Jen Everett
I received my PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2001 and am now Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Environmental Fellows Program at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  My areas of specialization include ethical theory, social and political philosophy, and environmental philosophy, emphasizing issues at the intersection of animal ethics and environmental ethics, the ethics of consumption and waste, climate change, and the role of sustainability in higher education.  I have previously published in Ethics & the Environment, Journal of Social Philosophy, and Theory in Research & Education, and am currently engaged interdisciplinary interrogations of practices of material disposal and human disposability.  If elected, this will be my third turn on ISEE’s Nominations Committee, having served from 2006-09 and 2012-15.  I am interested in seeing a greater turn toward public engagement on ISEE’s part, collaboration with environmental studies associations outside of philosophy, and increased diversity in the environmental ethics community.

Lori Gruen
I am Professor of Philosophy, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University where I also coordinate Wesleyan Animal Studies.  My work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals.  I have published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics, animal ethics, and environmental philosophy.  I am the author of Entangled Empathy and Ethics and Animals:  An Introduction (2011), the editor of The Ethics of Captivity, the co-editor of four books, including the second edition of Reflecting on Nature (2012), and the author of dozens of articles and book chapters.  I have documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US (http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu) and The Last 1000 (http://www.last1000chimps.com/) that was recently featured in a David Suzuki documentary (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2k1vq7).  My website is www.lorigruen.com.