Future Pasts

I am a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University.

 

Involvement with the ‘low impact development’ movement in the UK in the early 1990s dropped me into an unexpectedly complex world of legal and political arguments about what exactly was meant by the deliberately vague term ‘sustainable development’, particularly in the context of land-use planning. This led me to discover the joys of environmental philosophy, and in 1996 I enrolled for an MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University. For the next decade or so I combined part-time academic study with a career in outdoor event management, eventually emerging with a doctorate in environmental ethics and political theory from Keele University in 2009.

 

Since then I have published on a range of issues, mostly centred on the relationship between human flourishing and ecological sustainability. Some of my work remains theoretical, but more empirical contexts in which this issue has been explored include nuclear waste disposal, permaculture and biodiversity offsetting. My recent book Freedom and Environment: autonomy, human flourishing and the political philosophy of sustainability was published in Routledge's Research in Environmental Politics series, and is now available in paperback. Other academic publications are listed here. Some less academic articles can be found via The Land Magazine, which I co-edit.  

 

My current research at Bath Spa as part of Future Pasts brings together many of my interests, and I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to work with anthropologists in exploring sustainability issues in a very different cultural context.