Peters, James Sedalia

I am presently ABD in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and am interested in forest conservation through sustainable forest management and sustainable forest enterprise.  My degree will be in forest resources.  My earlier professional life involved architectural design, housing development, energy conservation in buildings, and energy policy.  Now, I am interested in the use of wood as a building material and in building methods that make use of local forest resources and minimize industrial processing.  My research focus has become the geographies of human-environment systems.  My dissertation is titled: Materiality and Location: A Geographic Study of Log Home Manufacturing.  It uses GIS and spatial statistics to study the spatiality of building methods.

In general, I view the linkages between humans and our environment as where the rubber meets the road in environmental conservation and find the perspective of Actor-Network Theory to be extremely useful.  I am an older student, but, upon getting my Ph.D., I hope to work in environmental advocacy and academia.