News about Eve Vogel

I get some of my class news from automatic Google searches that seek out news about the Class of 1987.  A recent hit came up abut Eve Vogel.

Eve has a webpage on which she describes what she has been up to.  You can click here to check it out.

Here is some of what Eve says about her varied and interesting career:


I’ve had an eclectic career. The theme over time has been trying to merge environmental conservation, social justice, and thoughtful analysis of how the two may be coordinated – as well as what are the constraints on this coordination. My current research on long-term river basin governance and politics and its social and environmental consequences follows this theme.

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and went to high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. In college at Yale I majored in environmental biology and spent two summers as a research assistant studying beetle and spider behavioral ecology. I loved science but by the time I graduated I knew I wanted something that could address some of the human causes and consequences of environmental problems.  After college, I joined the Peace Corps, working in wildlands management and environmental education in Honduras. I worked with foresters, agricultural extension agents, farmers, and especially rural teachers to help educate people about the importance of cloud forests.  (They’re important biodiversity refuges and critical sources of water, as well as places where nearby peasants can supplement their resources with game and medicinal plants.) I loved my job, but over time I became convinced that most environmental and social strains in Honduras were caused at least as much by U.S. policy and economics as by any lack of education in Honduras. I decided I needed to learn more about how to influence environmental policy and practice back in the U.S.

In 1990 I returned to the US and in 1991, I moved to Portland, Oregon. For two years I worked at the Audubon Society of Portland in environmental education. In 1993 I went back to school to get a high school teaching certificate, and from 1994-1997 I taught high school biology, math and Spanish in inner city Portland and at a new arts school in Vancouver, Washington.

In 1997 I left high school teaching to work more directly on environmental policy change. Working for the Sierra Club and the Oregon Natural Resources Council, I learned how to write an Endangered Species petition; I edited an economics report on the economics of removing four federal dams on the lower Snake River; and I went on two group lobbying trips to Washington, DC. This was a tremendously educational year for me, as it gave me great insights into policy-making and political negotiating processes, but ultimately I decided I needed to step back and understand the issues more broadly.

I returned to graduate school in 1998 at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, in the Department of Geography.  As a graduate student, I TAed both Biology and Geography courses, and taught six of my own classes at the University of Oregon and at Portland State University, ranging from “Law, Geography and the Environment” to “Geography of East Asia.”  My son Ari was born in 2004.  I earned my PhD in December 2007 and moved to Amherst to work as Assistant Professor at UMass in summer 2008.