Research and teaching emphases are on the politics of international development and environmental conservation, with a focus on institutional change, property rights, poverty, and biodiversity. Written extensively on 1) indigenous knowledge, 2) community-based conservation, 3) common property, 4) population and resources, and 5) environmental identities. Recent interests include the decentralization of environmental policy (especially forestry and wildlife), and the emergence of environment as a subject of human concern.

Instrumental in establishing the School's Environmental Justice Program that focuses on the differential impact of environmental contaminants on people of color and low-income communities; Founder and Director of the Environmental Justice Initiative for research and retrieval/dissemination conferences and policy briefings. Research and conferences include both a domestic and international foci, particularly on climate justice. Teaching portfolio includes: Introduction to Environmental Justice (Environ. 222), Conception, Practical Issues and Dilemmas in Environmental Justice (SNRE 582), and the Masters Project/NRE 701.

Teaching and research interests are focused on environmental justice, public opinion and the environment, and influences on environmental policy making. A founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan. Current research includes understanding the causes of disproportionate environmental burdens in people of color communities and the role that environmental factors play in accounting for racial and socioeconomic disparities in health.

Research focus

Issues of social and ecological sustainability with a primary focus on the drivers of overconsumption and the conditions for restrained resource use.

My research interests include green jobs and other environmental labor market dynamics; social movement analysis; environmental justice; leisure and natural resource use; urban and rural poverty; and race, gender and ethnic relations. My current research includes and assessment of the green job sector.  Other recent researh activities have include four national studies of racial and gender diversity in the environmental field.  I have just completed a book on urban environmental history; I am in the process of completing companion books on (a) conservation history and (b) environmental justice history.  

Beth Diamond is a landscape theorist, designer and cultural instigator who believes in landscape architecture as an art form and a visionary medium for social change and evolution. Her interests stem from a fascination with the qualities and expressions of the built world as a mirror of human civilization and her work in landscape architecture focuses on strategies to transform societies in sustainable and culturally affirming ways.

Professor Hardin holds a joint position with the Department of Anthropology. Her areas of interest and scientific study include human/wildlife interactions, and social and environmental change related to tourism, logging, conservation and hunting in the forests of Central African Republic. Recent projects focus on the increasingly intertwined practices of health and environmental management in equatorial and southern Africa. She also studies historical and ethnographic aspects of concessionary politics involving corporations, NGOs, and local communities, particularly in Africa.

Ivette Perfecto is professor of Ecology and Natural Resources. Her research focuses on biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, primarily in the tropics. She also works on spatial ecology of the coffee agroecosystem and is interested more broadly on the links between small-scale sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and food sovereignty. She teaches General Ecology, Our Common Future (a course on globalization), Food Land and Society and Field Ecology. Her most recent book is Nature’s Matrix: The Link between Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty.