About

Stan Stevens photo

Stan Stevens

B.A., Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 1983
M.A., Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 1986
Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 1989

Senior Lecturer in Geography

Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts

political and cultural ecology, Indigenous peoples, conservation, and protected areas.

As a human geographer my research and teaching explore society/”nature” relations by integrating conceptual and methodological approaches from political ecology, cultural ecology, environmental history, indigenous studies, and post-colonial studies. I am particularly concerned with documenting and supporting indigenous peoples’ socio-ecological systems, land use, commons governance and management, conservation values and practices, and struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and defense of territory against expropriation and extractive industries. This has involved me in advocacy and policy work promoting Indigenous rights, rights-based conservation, conservation by Indigenous peoples and local communities, and protected area reform includes engagement with indigenous peoples’ organizations in Nepal, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global ICCA Consortium.  I serve as  a steering committee member and officer of the ICCA Consortium, an association of more than eighty Indigenous peoples organizations, community organizations, and supportive NGOs that works worldwide to support appropriate recognition of territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities.  My three books on these themes are Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: a New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights (University of Arizona Press, 2014), Conservation through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas (Island Press 1997), and Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya (University of California Press, 1993).  I teach courses on political ecology, Indigenous peoples and conservation, protected areas, the political ecology of climate change, and world environmental issues.