Nature-Society or Global Environmental Studies
Clark geography maintains a history steeped in human-environment studies, long before current public and professional interests in environment arose. The human-environment geography faculty at Clark (Professors Emel, Johnson, Kasperson, Polsky, Pontius, Ratick, Rocheleau, Rogan, and Turner), joined by the physical geography faculty (Professors Kuhn and Lewis), focus on the coupled human-environment system, ranging from satellite imagery analysis of suburban impacts on water quality in New England to empowering women's access to natural resources in the Zimbabwe.
Three core areas describe the Clark nature-society studies:
- Integrated land-change science, wedding natural, social, and GIS sciences to address human-induced changes in the environment and the feedbacks on humankind;
- Globalization of environmental problems, especially theories and discourses; and
- Environment and development, merging theory-concepts with real-world practice.
Each faculty member has core expertise in one of these areas, with interests and experience that extend to at least one of the others. In addition, faculty in this group pursue cross-cutting themes that link to other faculty clusters at Clark, as with GIS program, IDCE, environmental economics, and the Marsh Institute. At the moment key themes of study are deforestation, land degradation and change; water and law; environmental risk-hazards and vulnerability; land and environmental modeling; and gender and development.
The human-environment geography faculty at Clark embrace a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches as embedded in empirically rich analysis, much it linked to remote sensing and geographical information systems.
Current faculty research focuses on these questions:
- What are the consequences of western society’s visions of nature on native wildlife?
- What are the major forms of land degradation worldwide and what real world practices work to ameliorate them?
- Can climate-driven famine in Africa be predicted in sufficient time to assist aid agencies?
- What drives tropical deforestation and can the resolution between environment and human health be enhanced by spatially explicit models this change?
- How has industrialization and suburban expansion in central Massachusetts affected environmental quality?
- Who and what economic systems are vulnerable to climate change?