UniEcoBudget Working Group

I've been interested in sustainability since the early 90s when I joined Greenpeace as a member. A little later, I started thinking a lot about animal exploitation and quickly adopted a vegan diet. Then in 1993 I moved from Illinois to San Diego, CA  and started woking for Greenpeace as a canvasser. This wasn't the glamorous job I'd dreamed of--preventing whales from being harpooned on the high seas--but it did teach me a lot. I worked in the natural foods industry for several years, where I continued to learn about the negative impacts of industrial agriculture and the benefits associated with eating a locally grown, organic, plant-based diet.

I studied fairly broadly in school, studying cultural anthropology for my bachelors degree (UCSC 1997) and social science for my masters (San Jose State 1999). In these academic endeavors, I continued to focus on society's negative impact on the environment and I wrote my masters thesis The Social Construction of Nature as the Other and its Human Consequences to outline the historical paradigm shifts I saw in humanity's relationship with nature.

Since 2005 I've been an on-call instructor for UCSC Extension, teaching foreign students in the English Language and International Programs department. I designed a class called Society and the Environment, where we critically examine the impact of unsustainable U.S. transportation and food choices on the environment. I chose these two topics because their cultural roots (car culture/fast food culture) are so deeply ingrained in U.S. society and because of their enormous impact on the environment. I believe that these two subjects are critically important for us to examine, because they are very likely to be the areas that we as individuals can make the greatest improvement in our collective environmental impact.