Emilio Moran, who most recently was featured for his rainforest conservation work in Campinas, Brazil, on MSU’s SPARTANS WILL. 360 site, is co-editor of a new book “Human-Environmental Interactions.”
Moran, Visiting Hannah Professor in the Department of Geography at MSU, makes the case that people – their motivations and indeed, how they feel – are indispensable data when it comes to saving the planet and addressing environmental problems.
“For many years people have tended to work separately across many different interests,” Moran said. “Today they all agree we need to work together and integrate the mechanisms and methods of social and natural sciences in order to address environmental problems.”
Moran is a world-renowned social scientist who has made his academic mark by resolutely marching into other disciplines. Trained as a social anthropologist, he has worked for 30 years in the Brazilian Amazon, exploring the humid tropic’s potential for intensive agriculture – a question that has led him academically into soils, agricultural production, deforestation, reforestation and how humans make decisions.
Now Moran is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and what then was an academic incongruity today has become cutting edge contemporary scientific pursuit valued by many scientists.
The book, which he co-edited with Eduardo Brondizio of Indiana University, joins junior and senior scientists to explore what role humans play in addressing health challenges, managing forests and animal species across the world, and how they make good and bad decisions of environmental significance.