Michael Maniates
Professor of Environmental Science
  and Political Science
Allegheny College

Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies
Oberlin College

    michael.maniates@allegheny.edu

    michael.maniates@oberlin.edu

Who is He?

For over 25 years, Michael Maniates (curriculum vitæ) has worked to illuminate democratic paths to environmental sustainability.  

As a writer, speaker, teacher and scholar, Maniates focuses on issues of consumption and overconsumption, interdisciplinary undergraduate education, energy futures, and the global politics of environment and development. He has co-founded two award-winning environmental organizations, directed a semester of study on a floating university, and consulted widely with colleges and universities on sustainability initiatives.  Maniates is the only faculty member at Allegheny appointed to a position in strategic planning and media relations, and he is the recipient of one of Allegheny's top teaching awards.  He is widely published, founded and administers a set of networked resources for scholars and practitioners of global environmental politics, and is the co-recipient of the prestigious Sprout award for the best book in global environmental affairs.  He was a Fulbright and Smithsonian scholar to India. Michael is especially interested in strategic action for sustainability that combines participatory democracy with elite-brokered choice editing.  Neither top-down or bottom-up, Maniates prefers to think of his work as strategically sideways.

Where is He?

Michael Maniates currently serves as a senior Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.  He is on leave from his position as Full Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. (His is the only active joint appointment at Allegheny that bridges the natural- and social-sciences.)  Maniates  is also a frequent faculty member with Semester at Sea, a study abroad program of the University of Virginia.  He's sailed on five voyages, often in leadership positions, and most recently up the Amazon River as a Distinguished Lecturer in December 2012.  He's next scheduled to teach courses on environmental policy and sustainability on the Summer 2014 voyage through the Baltic.  He makes his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife, two cats, and one rosy boa constrictor.

What Is He Up To?

In addition to mentoring students, Michael is at work on four overlapping projects:

ø  One is a 50,000-word book (It's the Maze, Not the Mouse!) that arms everyday citizens with the environmentally restorative tools of choice editing.  This manuscript builds on the recent The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice (with John Meyer, MIT Press 2010)), which explores the underappreciated yearning of people to sacrifice for higher aims, including the environment.  It also tests the claims made in his frequently cited essay "Individualization: Plant a Tree, Ride A Bike, Save the World" (abridged version here), which complements Michael's work on voluntary simplicity and political action in Confronting Consumption (with Tom Princen and Ken Conca, MIT Press 2002).

ø  Another is an ongoing assessment of social-change assumptions by undergraduate students in environmental studies/science (ES).  A preliminary survey in late 2009 (national survey, random sample, n= 437) by Sam Rigotti, Allegheny '10, suggests that ES students command a heightened natural-science understanding of world. They are afflicted, however, by an emaciated and ultimately self-defeating sense of how social change occurs.  ES programs appear reluctant to address this shortcoming, perhaps for fear of being perceived as training 'environmentalists' rather than 'objective' environmental scientists.  A national survey inspired by Rigotti's earlier investigation is set to launch in late 2012.  This inquiry hearkens back Maniates' earlier  research on environmental studies programs, reported in "Environmental Studies: The Sky is Not Falling" (BioScience).  The framework for this research, and the opportunity for undergraduate environmental science/studies programs to 'move to the next level,' is summarized in "Teaching for Turbulence" in State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? 

ø  A third project, too long on the back burner, documents how recycling -- and especially curbside recycling -- torpedoed an emerging politics of reduce and reuse in American environmental politics in the 1980s.  Recycling is now the badge of honor among environmentally thinking citizens.  Few such citizens realize that much of this recycling practice was created by major bottling and beverage industries as a firewall against a re-use economy that would have complicated their business practices.

ø  A final project, still in the dabbling stages, is a series of short science-fiction stories that capitalize on the feeling of time slowing down when we are plunged into particularly stressful, sometimes near-death, experiences.

More?

For more detail, please see Professor Maniates' curriculum vitæ.  Contact him at one of the two email addresses listed above.