Your purposes and objectives in pursuing graduate study:
Grow, or die.
Whether to ~ .
Whether I prefer to hide in my room and forget what flies, floats wheels or runs about out of my door. Or open it every day and, not knowing whether I am welcome, go out and join in the carting and careening, pitching and yawing. And create welcome. Thus I open my sail, let it fill with wind, and let it take me places I have not been. To be guided by stars I did not name, but cast light upon me.
All is pursuit of rightness, calm and connection, buffeted by chaos, crisis, conflict, contradiction, challenge and growth. For me, opportunities to create new knowledge, to write, to teach, and to speak; to feel human need and the need for meaning, and derive wisdom from it. To discern how we might tie our fates into one effort, and thus avoid the mass extinction due to us in the near future. To extract from science and human intercourse what acts of kindness and courage are needed to transform our world, to end misery, genocide, and ecocide. What can we learn from our previous mistakes to avoid mistakes we have yet to make?
This path is one of many paths, each valid; mine, to understand the forces that shape the motivations and actions of human beings, so I may put my shoulder behind our salvation. Economics, Ecology, Sociology, Religion, Politics, Psychology, History, Literature, Media, and the emotions coursing through my body, are all subjects I study. In this program, I will begin with the required courses, and seek from my advisors and colleagues how to advance this mission: how to build a sustainable community.
My ambition to be seen and recognized as a worthwhile member of our community is common and unremarkable. My ability to see and articulate structures of human ambition, appetites, fear, integrity and community, and their effects on the world, is not common, and my ability to name them is rare. The joy I get from sharing that vision is the reason I work for this path.
Any particular reasons you may have for applying to the University of Vermont :
My first ambition has always been to get a doctoral degree. And perhaps if I am very successful in a Master’s program, I will naturally stream into a doctoral program. But perhaps when I am done I will be content to write, teach and advocate. In either case, I must first succeed here, now, where I live. I have worked to put in roots here. I have devoted countless hours to community service here, and have developed a wide network of friends. I see no sense in taking my work to another city. Thus I choose UVM as the place to pursue my degree, and give to it my hopes of writing, teaching, and creating new knowledge. And in search of that Master’s degree, the department of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont seems to be the best place for my work.
Would you like to work with a specific faculty member?
The faculty person with whose work my own interests most closely align is Josh Farley. But no commitments have been made.
If applicable, any research projects or any independent research in which you have actively participated and how they have influenced your career choice and desire to pursue graduate studies;
My questions are primal, and existential: How do I survive? What are the obstacles to my survival? What are the obstacles to creating a home, a family, a life filled with love and joy? What are the obstacles to knowing myself in community? Thus in my perambulations, islands I have visited include anthropology, history, economics, sociology, biology, ecology, evolution, and the stories of those who live, and suffer, around me. The answers I find do not take me on familiar routes: I do not seek the seal skins, whale meat, or harbors of hunters of gold: what I want is to find the Northwest passage of human survival: What must I and we be doing now so that life on Earth is not destroyed by the recklessness of humanity? What must I and we be doing now so that the lives being lived now can be lived with meaning and richness? I find my life attached to the lives of those around me: How do we survive together?
First was anthropology, natural selection, evolution, and carrying capacity, in high school; in 1980 sciences at Westchester Community College; in 1988 at Goddard College I read “Introduction to Ecology” by Paul Colinvaux, an eloquent exposition of ecosystem science. Throughout the 45 years of my adulthood, reading.
In 1978 I received an Associate’s degree in printing technology; in 1988, a Bachelor of Arts from Goddard College; in 1998 at Johnson State College I received a BS with a concentration in Ecology, and studied education at the graduate level. I have experienced and learned from privilege, and the plunge from privilege, from mental illness, loneliness, poverty, hardship, and recovery; I have studied in the peace movement, in Occupy, at the Gund Institute, with the Monetary Policy Working group, and I have read hundreds of books. While at Johnson I was told: “Your work is post-doctoral. You must go on.”
Since 2008 I have written, on average once per month, erecting the flag of Who I Am, in a blog for the world to see (Dispolemic.blogspot.com).
Since 2011 I have attended seminars at the Gund Institute, worked with faculty, and audited the class in Ecological Economics. I have studied with Josh Farley and his colleagues and students, traveling with them in 2012 to a De-Growth Conference in Montreal. Today I work with Josh on a chapter in a work intended to guide future research on Ecological Economics.
Over the last five years I have done the work of establishing myself as an active, contributing member of the Burlington community. I have worked at COTS, the day shelter for homeless folks, I have worked at CEDO, of the City of Burlington, where I built a strong reputation, and at CVOEO, the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, our community action agency, where I wrote a report intended to chart a course for the development of CVOEO. Over the last three years I have added my voice to and worked as part of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, which works to end homelessness, as its member with lived experience, living with and representing those who are homeless in Burlington. Over these five years I have gathered the reputation and references I needed for my application to UVM.
The pursuit of a Master’s degree is the next adventure, fulfilling my lifelong drive to learn, create, speak and bring justice into our world.
Your special interests and plans:
Generally, I am eager to work with faculty at the University to produce research, to write my own papers, perhaps develop journal projects, and to teach students in the subject areas of my expertise. If it is not too great a conceit, this education will provide the substance of fiction I hope yet to write.
More particularly, I have wanted to understand how ecological processes affect the development of economic activity and cultural activity. I am especially interested in carrying capacity, the ecological concept, and how it affects the stresses and boundaries in economic activity. A good demonstration of the principle of carrying capacity is seen in the problem of housing supply. Laws, zoning, and culture, in areas like Chittenden County, limit the availability of land for low cost housing (capacity boundary), while the demand for housing is high. You could say that the carrying capacity of the housing stock is lower than the supply of occupants. Since there are many unfilled jobs, the carrying capacity of employment is higher than the supply of potential employees. What effect does the excess of occupants have on the market and the cost of housing? What insights do we gain from this point of view, as opposed to a supply and demand perspective? How does this carrying capacity affect other aspects of the ecology of the economy?
The key insight of Ecological Economics is that the economy must be sustained within ecological boundaries, and the key implication is that ecological services must be protected and paid for by that economy, as if these were distinct, if interacting, phenomena. The key postulation that I bring to the table is that economies can be modeled as ecologies. This perspective embeds the economy in the environment in a new way, asking questions about community structure, reproduction, r-K behavior, predation, production, trophic levels, and questions about how resources are allocated. I would like to know whether, if we describe the economy as an ecology, we begin to remind people of the interconnection between the health of the economy and the health of the Earth.
The vision of a humanity which arranges its economies within the embrace of nature seems necessary and compelling to me. I want to study, understand and argue for human systems that are sustainable. And I am, if nothing else, a word smith, an explainer, a teacher, and an advocate. So the work I carve out for myself, is to seek and share the knowledge of how we – all of us as human beings – will avoid the impending natural disaster, the Gaia-cide.
Your strengths and weaknesses in your chosen field:
I will tell you what my strengths are: the writer has brain wiring that fuses words with meaning, astoundingly, producing entire thoughts, concepts, images, abstractions and tales. For this, the writer must seek meaning and experience, hold, in a reservoir, these collections, and tally and mark them, on call. “The Writer” is not a mere scribe or vessel; The Writer processes sense information and presents it to other human beings to coach their enlightenment. And his or her own. I bring to you a writer.
The teacher is another sort of animal. The teacher must look upon her or his audience for the clues that will guide the speech, that will direct the information, the story, the explanation. The teacher must adjust his/her explorations to the fidgets and yawns, distracted looks, or rapt attention, find the alleys of learning readiness as they show up, and populate them according to the nooks, niches and nails upon which knowledge may be hung. The student, the listener, the audience member, has granted the teacher their time and attention, and in all due respect the teacher must discover why. I bring to you a teacher.
I will tell you what my weaknesses are: I am not very good at planning ahead. I do not plan words, spoken or written, into being. I listen them into being. I do not without counsel anticipate the consequences of my projects or efforts. I learn by trial and error, freely entering a new contract with the expectation I will fail and pick myself up and try again.
In the subject areas, my strength is my weakness: I am intuitive. I do not carry racks upon racks of random facts; I do not always remember names. I am distracted by the present and the needs of this moment. I depend upon clues. I am attentive to meta-communication. I read slowly. My comfort in crowds is completely a fabrication. Yet my comfort speaking is undeniable. This, and that my writing has become very personal: the rational, abstract, academic paper has lost its honey for me. I write to find meaning. But that is the definition of my work and my ambition: To find, create, communicate meaning. Meaning for us all.
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