The focus of our 2018-19 Think Tank is how humans relate to and value the non-human part of the world, as illustrated in our 2018 Where on Earth Are We Going? symposium.

Barry Chernoff
Robert F. Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies
Director, College of the Environment

Professor Barry Chernoff joined the Wesleyan faculty in 2003 where he holds the Robert F. Schumann Chair of Environmental Studies. He is the director of the College of the Environment.

Chernoff teaches courses in Environmental Studies, Tropical Ecology, Aquatic Ecosystem Conservation, and Quantitative Analysis for the departments of Biology and Earth and Environmental Sciences.  Chernoff's research centers on the freshwater fishes of the Neotropical region, primarily those in South America in the Amazon.  His research includes, ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation.  He has also led international teams on expeditions designed to conserve large watersheds of the world, having made more than 32 expeditions in 12 countries. Recently, Professor Chernoff and his students have been working on aquatic ecology and conservation of Connecticut watersheds.  In the past he has held professorial and curatorial positions at the Field Museum, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.  He holds a visiting position at Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has authored and co-authored more than 87 scientific articles and books.  Chernoff has received a number of awards including the Caleb T. Winchester Outstanding Scholar and Teacher Award in from Xi of Psi Upsilon, Wesleyan University and a Commendation for Excellence in Teaching, University of Chicago in 2000.  Chernoff was elected to the Connecticut Academy of Sciences and Engineering in 2005, where he now chairs the Environmental Science and Technology Board. From 1993-1999, he served on the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Biological Sciences elected by the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, and served as vice chairman from 1995-1997 and  chairman from 1997-1999.  He serves on the Inland Fish Commission's Endangered and Threatened Fishes Panel for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. Chernoff co-wrote the script for a short documentary film entitled "Understanding Biodiversity" that was awarded finalist status at a number of film festivals, including Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, and received the Silver Apple Award from the American Educational Network. He has served on the boards of a number of community-oriented foundations, including the Confluence Greenway Project of St. Louis, Mo., and as President of the Sustainable Aquatic Research Center.  Chernoff served as President of The Jonah Center for Earth and Art, from 2004-2010 in Middletown, CT.

Frederick Cohan
Professor of Biology
I am writing a book that aims to motivate environmentalism through our visceral fear of infections: Plagued by Our Success—How Human Domination of the Planet is Making Us Sick. Our fear of infections is ancient, and our tendency to avoid infections is shared across non-human animal species, and I believe this fear can motivate an environmentalism that simultaneously improves the health of humans and the environment. I am showing how many of our essential demands on the environment are impacting wild creatures in such a way that we are likely to pick up novel infections from other species. That is, when we hunt wild creatures, engage in agriculture, transport animals, consume energy, or cure our infections, we increase our vulnerability to infections. My suggestion for incorporating infectious disease into an environmental ethic stems from a public health ethic from the turn of the 20th century. This was known as “the socialism of the microbe”—that we must care for others’ infections lest they become our own. For the last century, this ethic motivated investment in secure public water supplies, government agencies dedicated to public health, vaccination programs, and medical research. I am aiming to update microbial socialism for the 21st century. The idea is that our investment in health must go beyond medical care of the sick and preventing infections through medical means; we must also invest in the environment, both here and abroad, to minimize the risk of infections.

Antonio Machado-Allison
Menakka and Essel Bailey '66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment
The overall title for my work is “The importance of the aquatic freshwater biodiversity in the maintenance and welfare of human local and regional human populations.” This work will have two main components. I list each separately below.

Adaptive Conservation and Management of the Aquatic Biodiversity of the Orinoco River Basin, Venezuela and Colombia, South America. This project will develop a basin-wide management and conservation plan for the Orinoco River Basin that is shared by Colombia and Venezuela.  The Orinoco River basin is one of the most important basins in South America from the standpoint of biodiversity and from the standpoint of human use.  From an ichthyological perspective, the number of species, standing biomass and quantities of fisheries landing rank the Orinoco as second and third among all river systems in the world (second in biodiversity and third in fisheries with landings exceeding 75 million metric tons per year). Furthermore, many different populations of people rely on the freshwaters of the Orinoco basin for food, irrigation, fisheries, recreation, and spiritual-cultural legacy.  The overall value from fisheries, agriculture and ranching of the Orinoco social-ecological system exceeds a billion US dollars.  Despite the critical importance of the Orinoco River basin to peoples of Colombia, Venezuela and the world, there are no comprehensive management strategies in place that will promote sustainability of the natural resources.  Protection for non-commercial species (environmental others) and the willingness to protect non-commercial species is low to non-existent.   Furthermore, the level of risks and threats are increasing dramatically due to factors that include but are not limited to over-fishing, un-regulated gold mining, oil exploration, and deforestation. My project will seek to develop a sustainable use plan that includes humans as part of the plan and will value and protect as much biodiversity and critical parts of the ecosystem as possible.

The Caura River Basin. I will produce a book on the Caura River Basin in South America that include aspects of its geography, hydrology, regional and national importance. Also, fisheries and an annotated list of fish species with descriptive diagnosis and key characters of the most important ones that will include ecological notes, habitat usage, potential economic importance, spiritual meaning with images of them that illustrate the printout. Furthermore, mention of other important aquatic fauna and flora that form part of the ecosystem. The book will include also aspects on the historical and ecological biogeography and will conclude with an analysis of its conservation, potential threats and means to protect this important area.of those ecosystems such as: damming of head waters, pollution by agricultural, industrial and domestic activities, changes on normal climatic/hydraulic fluxes, mining (petroleum, gold, coltan bauxite), overfishing and introduction of exotic species. The knowledge of the megadiversity of the fish fauna of the Orinoquia has implications in its conservation, but also as part of the well social and economic being of the region due to its contribution to food security and economical benefits to the local/regional human populations.  

Marcela Oteiza
Associate Professor of Theater
Theater is inherently an anthropocentric form; since at its heart, it is the telling and retelling of the human story. These stories, through enactment and repetition, become part of our culture; a culture that shapes the mode in which we see, inhabit and understand the world, as well as our relation to it. Almost every culture in the world has its own form of story-telling. Theater is one of them. It has shaped the western world through the myths imbedded in tragedies, farces and comedies, as well as contemporary intercultural stories of migrations. Theater is inherently an interdisciplinary form, where text, embodiment and visual elements coexist in both space and time. Street theater, in particular, has been in dialogue with its environment since at least medieval times, utilizing the architectural sites of the city (parades that tie together state and church; moving from a cathedral to the arch of triumph), to more recently Eugenio Barba, who uses ‘invasions’ in the small villages of Peru (making community during the 70s), to flash mobs in New York City during the 99% insurrection (utilizing social-media groups). 

Theater builds and questions our construction of culture and what we consider our culture and community to be. What if that community takes into consideration the ecosystem where it exists? And the stories and materials that we build with are embedded within theater and not outside of it?

While at the College of the Environment, I am working on specific performances and groups of street theater that utilize objects representing the human, The self and the automaton. This research project encompasses my work during multiple street theater festivals (Santiago, Chile: Aurillac, France; Montreal, Canada; Edinburgh, Scotland). In all of these venues, street-theater companies utilize objects to co-construct stories; namely, the central idea of the self and the automaton, focusing on street-performance scenographic object representations of the human, examining which characteristics are designed as the ‘ones’ that reflect humanity. My work looks at how the placing of the humanity (the self) into the object (the it), providing us with a better understanding of the ecosystem in which we live.

Some of the performances that I will be looking at for this particular research are: (1) The little giant, from Compagnie Off, 2014; (2) Dundun, Luz de Vida by Tobias Husemann and Stefan Charisius, 2017; and (3) Venus, by company L’homme Debout, directed by Benoît Mousserion, 2018.

Helen Poulos
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
This year, my research examines the effects of wildfire on forest structure and species composition in the Davis and Guadalupe mountain ranges of West Texas. The removal of frequent, low intensity surface fires from the forested landscapes of Southwestern United States has resulted in widespread fuel accumulation and increased wildfire risk. Over a century of fire exclusion through livestock grazing and direct fire suppression has altered the horizontal and vertical continuity of fuels and produced forest stand structures that are now susceptible to intense crown fires that differ significantly from the range of historical fire regime variability. The increased prevalence of high intensity crown fires in areas that historically experienced low intensity surface fires has triggered both public and private interest in minimizing the risk of future catastrophic wildfire. Four wildfires have burned through my permanent vegetation monitoring plot network in the last 7 years. Over the last year, I revisited 200 permanent monitoring plots that were initially established prior to these fire events to evaluate the relationships between wildfire severity and forest ecosystem structure and function. This research project is directly focused on informing applied and adaptive resources management and products from this research will: 1) evaluate the effects of wildfire severity on the horizontal and vertical distribution of vegetation and fuels at the landscape- and regional-scales, and 2) provide land managers at both sites with decision support for future fuel reduction treatment implementation activities such as thinning and/or prescribed fire by identifying key locations where the these wildfires have resulted in new dead and down fuel load inputs that are in need of active fuels management.

Justine Quijada
Assistant Professor of Religion
Agency in Atheist and Animist Worlds. The now century old anthropological concept of “animism” has recently experienced a resurgence, as a way of theorizing both indigenous and possibly more ecologically sustainable relationships to the environment. My project revisits the literature, both old and new, on animism to think about how agency is conceived in an animist (if there is such a thing) worldview as opposed to in a secular, post-Enlightenment worldview. I am interested in the question of who we think has the power to act in the world, and what the consequences are for thinking about the environment if human beings are not the only beings with agency. I will be approaching this both on a theoretical level and in relationship to my fieldwork with urban shamans in Buryatia, who are re-building shamanic practices as post-atheist subjects. They provide an interesting case study of how people raised as atheists come to perceive other-than-human actors as agents in the world and extend social relations to other-than-human actors.

Isaac Klimasmith '20
The modern understanding of infectious disease is the legacy of sweeping social and medical changes that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this era, the "socialism of the microbe" developed, the understanding that because the disease of one can become the disease of all, maintaining the health of all social groups, regardless of economic status, is critical for a healthy society. While military metaphors of illness, common in Progressive-era campaigns, still structure the discourse of disease, disease prevention has become a highly individualized pursuit. Environmental health hazards, such as air pollution, drinking water contamination, and antibiotic resistance constitute major sources of sickness, but these issues are too often ignored and the communities they impact marginalized and dismissed. Reimagining the metaphors of infectious disease for an environmental context and reinvigorating the "socialism of the microbe” creates powerful tools with which to address environmental health issues as the responsibility of all.  

My work in the think tank focuses on analyzing the historical roots of modern metaphors of disease and investigating how those language choices diverge from descriptions of climate change and environmental health hazards. Does the way we describe and imagine climate change rob it of necessary urgency? Does the historical model of campaigns against infectious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis provide an appropriate model for motivating environmental action?  

Fiona McLeod '19
My thesis research is focused on investigating how conservation efforts transform geospatial realities for indigenous communities, both in terms of physical access to land and in terms of cultural and political recognition. I am studying historical and contemporary environmentalism in the United States, focusing on the political and ideological structures that guide public land management. My thesis is grounded in a critical analysis of wilderness as a culturally constructed ideology, investigating how rhetorical conventions that portray wilderness as “pure” and “uninhabited” write both the historical and contemporary presence of indigenous peoples out of landscape. I am also looking at how land conservation projects require physical boundaries to be drawn space which, in turn, establishes various conceptual binaries such as those between the protected and the non-protected, the wild and the tame, and the preserved versus the exploitable. Guided by these philosophical pursuits, I am studying the unprecedented federal protection and subsequent dismantling of Bears Ears National Monument as the central case study for my thesis, through which I am looking at the region’s historical and cultural significance to indigenous peoples as well as the detrimental effects that extractive industries, irresponsible governance, and social indifference towards Native spirituality and sacred sites have had on the landscape in Southwest. Working at the intersection of environmentalism and indigenous politics, I hope to encourage an environmental ethic that links land conservation with a responsibility to honor the indigenous history and spiritual importance of place and landscape.

Margaret O'Donnell '19
For my thesis, I am exploring spirituality’s place in end of life care through the role of the chaplain. In speaking with chaplains, hospice care volunteers, doctors, and pastoral care providers I am trying to work out the objectives and expectations placed on chaplains by the secular institution of the hospice. How do chaplains assert (or conceal) their religiosity within the secular and scientific sphere of the hospice? And how does their presence within the hospice challenge (or reaffirm) conceptions of secular and religious space? On a more philosophical level, I am also investigating the way divisions between mind and body are negotiated by hospice chaplains compared to the larger care team. How do chaplains attempt to help people facing deteriorating health and increasing pain do so with less fear and dread? My intention with this thesis is to shed greater light on the way religion and religious language/frameworks are operating in secular spaces, as well as to uncover what focusing on the role of the chaplain can reveal to both those working inside and outside of medicine about how to care for those whose treatment is no longer deemed "sustainable."