Logo

Tom Hatley is a Sequoyah Distinguished Professor in Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University, where he teaches and directs programmes in the areas of conflict resolution, Native American history, and cultural and environmental issues. He studied forestry (at Yale) and history (at Duke) and, after a spell as a participant in the Young Scientists Summer Programme at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, became the first Stewardship Director of the Nature Conservancy in North Carolina. Subsequently, as Director of the six-state Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, he has been influential in the passage of the Clinton Administration's roadless areas protection rule for the US's national forests, and has had a hand in the collaborative settlements of the New York City watershed dispute. Author of The Dividing Paths - a History of the Cherokees and their neighbours in the Revolutionary era - he works closely with the present-day Cherokee people in Oklahoma and North Carolina.

The Challenging mountains - Makali in particular - lured Michael Warburton (in his saner moments a University of California at Berkeley-trained natural resource economist and lawyer) to the Himalaya; the people he met there taught him that 'development' will have to change if it is ever to be seen as 'help'. He worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis during the early 1980s and is now Executive Director of the Public Trust Alliance, a San Francisco-based organization which serves as a watchdog for public trust resources. His recent article - 'Towards Greater Certainty in Water Rights? Public Interests Require Inherent "Uncertainty" to Support Constitutional Governance of Our State's Waters' (McGeorge Law Review, 36, 2005) - builds on the idea that scientific and legal uncertainty are actually valuable institutional resources for supporting responsible public action in the face of changing circumstances.

Originally a professional soldier, Michael Thompson studied anthropology (first degree and PhD at University College London, B.Litt at Oxford) while also following a career as a Himalayan mountaineer (Annapurna South Face 1970, Everest Southwest Face 1975). His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique (Rubbish Theory, 1979, Oxford University Press) led to work on the 'energy tribes' (in various western think tanks), on risk, on Himalayan deforestation and sustainable development, on household product development (in Unilever), on global climate change, on technology and development, and on what might be called 'the even newer institutionalism' (e.g., Cultural Theory, co-authored with Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildvasky, 1990, West View). He is a Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, University of Oxford, an Institute Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria, and a Senior Researcher at the Stein rokkan Centre for Social Research, University of Bergen, Norway.