My primary professional interests while I was actively employed lay in building collaborations between earth scientists and social scientists to understand better how people relate to their environments, and to using the knowledge from these collaborations to help local people solve local problems. Theoretically, this meant a combination of ethno-ecology and resilience theory; substantively, it meant looking at the historical relations between people and natural resources, particularly forests; and geographically, it happens mostly in Liangshan, China, but also in Taiwan and in Washington State. Implications of this interest have led me to co-found the Yangjuan Primary School in Liangshan and the Cool Mountain Education Fund. My other interests are in building scholarly community across cultural barriers, particularly with scholars in China, and in promoting international student exchange. This in turn gives me reason to be interested in translation, particularly between the English and Chinese languages.

In retirement, I continue to be interested in collaborative research and writing, and particularly in seeing what can be done to improve relationships between university scholars and both rural and Native communities.