Green My Favela (GMF)
Created not-for-profit land use restoration and organic urban food security project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reclaimed land to build urban gardens at various scales, including organic food gardens, children’s gardens, vertical gardens, eco-parks, food forests, and orchards, with budgets up to $250,000. GMF has worked in collaboration with individuals, families, NGOs, schools, the private… Continue reading
Bifrost Online
Bifrost is a research collaboration that consists of field research elements and an online publication. The project aims to advance understandings of the societal and environmental challenges of climate change. I work with research networks to design environmental communications for sustainability science and integrated climate research projects. I also create and curate content across a… Continue reading
Florida Gulf Coast University
I have designed a syllabus and course material for teaching senior-level undergraduates about multi-pillar sustainability through field-based immersion learning. I am also an independent examiner for PhD theses. In addition, I conduct regional sustainability-related research and supervise students in collaboration with the Peace and Justice Studies Association to engage with environmental justice service-learning projects. I… Continue reading
Extract
Extract is the culmination of four years of action research into the legacy of coal and uranium mining on the tribal lands of the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. The research was carried out, in large part, in collaboration with the Navajo Abandoned Mine Lands Reclamation program (AML) and the Uranium Mill… Continue reading
Going Green Outreach Program
Going Green served as a community-oriented catalyst to promote Indigenous empowerment through digital story-telling initiatives, youth leadership, professional development and the advancement of eco-initiatives. The goal of the Going Green project was to announce an environmentally active presence to local communities and to make important information about regional issues surrounding energy production accessible to the… Continue reading
Burma: A Forgotten War
This award-winning film and oral histories project documents the startling resilience of Burma’s ethnic minorities who have lived under the rule of a corrupt junta in a state of civil war for more than 50 years. It exposes the impact of landmines and the government’s use of forced labor, torture, rape and drugs on the… Continue reading
Medicinal Seed Bank & Biomedicinal Teaching Toolkit
Medicinal Seed Bank is a databank project, lecture series and field teaching program used for the study and community sharing of medicinal seeds in Brazil. It was developed in combination with the production of biomedicinal teaching kits, which contained a microscope, beacons, slides, a medicinal plant catalogue, a field identification guide, a teaching manual, seeds,… Continue reading
Waste Audit and Recycling Program, Rocinha
Three projects were conducted in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro for the State Department for Social Development and Human Rights (SEASDH). The first project involved identifying areas to designate and develop as recycling and waste picking centers on roads wide enough to be accessed by vehicle. The process was conducted by GPS-tagging areas… Continue reading
Soil Health Program
Organized large-scale four-point soil analysis of lands available for restoration in Rio’s favelas as a way to determine the toxicity, so as to indicate what functions the land can or should perform. The analyses were conducted in collaboration with EMBRAPA, Brazil’s federal soil research facility, to determine heavy metal bio-accumulator levels (in particular, lead) in… Continue reading
Soup Kitchen
The soup kitchen was an emergency food program that served prepared, nutritious meals for homeless individuals and families that were food-insecure during the leadup to the 2012-2016 mega-events in Rio de Janeiro, when the police were conducting a brutal ‘clean the streets’ campaign in tandem with dispossessing many people from their homes in favelas. The… Continue reading
Flood Map
Rio de Janeiro is a city prone to flooding. Each year, thousands of people die from landslides caused by torrential rains. The city was not designed to handle its population of almost twelve million people. Poor planning and the precarious structures of favelas built on the steep hillsides and on landfills means homes are easily… Continue reading
Digital Seed Bank
Digital Seed Bank was a research project that began with the digital imaging of seventeen varieties of medicinal plants. It was originally produced in 2009, in consultation with New Mexico’s Seeds of Change organic seed and soil research facility. The project has since been reconfigured into various formats, including digital imaging workshops, and has been… Continue reading
Colony Collapse Monitoring
This project was a response to studies in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a term first applied to the drastic number of disappearances of commercial honey-bee colonies from late 2006 on. The causes are not fully understood and are attributed to a wide range of causes that range from biotic factors such as mites and insect… Continue reading
Where’s Your Power
This project was created in collaboration with Dr. John Fogerty, a medical physician and cofounder of New Energy Economy. The project had several components. One comprised of a video booth where visitors were asked to describe where their electricity comes from and where, in the future, they would like it to come from. In addition,… Continue reading
Living and Dying in Faith
The Ganges, one of the great rivers of the Indian subcontinent and the source of life for hundreds of millions of people, is under critical threat from climate change. The Himalayan glaciers that are the source of the river’s water are melting fast and could vanish in the coming decades. The worst predictions say water… Continue reading
Property of Water
Public access to clean water and sanitation in El Salvador is low. This leads to negative impacts on productivity and health, in particular, the health of the poor. Water resources are heavily polluted, and the great majority of wastewater is discharged without any treatment into the environment. It is estimated that 90 percent of surface… Continue reading