Yale Environment School Names Visiting Scholars for Academic Year

A leading Indian scholar and an environmental practitioner will be among several visiting scholars joining the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) at Yale.

Ramachandra Guha, India’s foremost environmental historian, will be in residence during the fall term and will teach two classes, “Ecology and Society” for F&ES and “Mahatma Gandhi and the Twentieth Century” for the History Department.

He is the author of numerous articles and 20 books, including “Environmentalism: A Global History” and “Lives in the Wilderness.” A new book, “How Much Should a Person Consume? Thinking Though the Environment,” is forthcoming in Fall 2006. His books and essays have been translated into 15 languages, including French, Japanese, Arabic and Bengali, and his first book, “The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya” (1989), was a pioneering piece that served as a model for many subsequent works by other researchers.

Guha has held several teaching positions around the world, including the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India; the University of California at Berkeley; and Oslo University in Scandinavia. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale F&ES from 1986-1987. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta.

Jerome Ringo, chair of the board of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), will be the Dorothy S. McCluskey Visiting Fellow for Conservation during the spring 2007 semester. In 2005, Ringo was elected to the chair of NWF and became president of the Apollo Alliance, a broad coalition of business, labor and environmental organizations that seeks to reinvest in the competitiveness of American industry, rebuild cities, create jobs for working families and ensure good stewardship of both the economy and the natural environment.

As a champion of environmental justice and a vocal advocate of clean energy, Ringo has firsthand experience in these issues after working for more than 20 years in Louisiana’s petrochemical industry. “He has a clear understanding of the impacts of poor environmental practices on the low-income communities that surround those petrochemical plants,” said Gus Speth, F&ES Dean.

While at F&ES, Ringo will not teach but will interact extensively with students, bringing them together with his wide array of contacts and programs, and providing them with new opportunities and insights. He will also offer a number of public and small group presentations. Ringo, whose family was evacuated by both hurricanes Katrina and Rita, will work closely with F&ES students who are studying the recovery efforts in New Orleans.

Mary Evelyn Tucker will be the Yale Bioethicist in Residence for the 2006-2007 academic year. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology and is currently a research associate at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Reishauer Institute at Harvard. While at Yale, she will teach two courses open to F&ES students: a “Seminar on World Religions and Ecology” in the fall, and “World Religions and Ecology: Asian Religions” in the spring.

Tucker is the author of “Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase” and “Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism.” She has also co-edited several other books. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in East Asian religions, with a concentration in Confucianism in China and Japan. Until 2005, she was a professor of religion at Bucknell University, where she taught courses in Asian religions and religion and ecology and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Chair from 1993-1996.

Jozef Pacyna, director of the Center for Ecological Economics at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, will be a resident at Yale during the fall semester and will teach a seminar on environmental modeling. He will collaborate with Thomas Graedel, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology, and the faculty and staff of the Center for Industrial Ecology.

An expert in the emissions of metals and organic chemicals from industrial operations, waste disposal and fossil fuel combustion, Pacyna is the author or co-author of 39 books and book chapters, 105 technical reports, 208 conference papers and 103 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has made his professional career in Norway, Poland, the United States, Sweden and the United Kingdom. For his work, he has been awarded the Main Award of the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Technology, and the Nordic Aerosol Association.