About Miller Worley Center for the Environment

Catherine Corson is the Miller Worley Associate Professor of Environmental Studies. As a political ecologist, she uses ethnography to explore questions of power, knowledge, and justice in case studies from rural villages to international policy arenas. Her current research focuses on the rise of market-based environmentalism, popular resistance to it, and associated shifts in environmental governance. Prior to receiving her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, Corson spent a decade as an environment and development policy analyst. Her interdisciplinary academic training, in biology, development studies, and environmental economics, as well as political ecology, underpins an interest in interdisciplinary teaching and research.

Stephen Taranto has been roaming the Americas for the past twenty years, learning about human-environment relationships and challenges to sustainability in a diversity of ecosystems, from the tropical forests of Panama to the glaciated peaks of the Central Andes. He has worked on an equally (well, not quite) diverse set of resource management projects, from forest management to agro-biodiversity conservation to eco-tourism. Stop by to share stories and discuss our common home!

Leszek Bledzki is a limnologist, ecologist and forester, and senior research associate of the Miller-Worley Center for the Environment, Environmental Studies and Biology Departments. He provides curricular support for environmentally-related laboratories in science courses; manages the collection/archival of water quality and weather data; and is assisting faculty and students with independent research. Bledzki's research interests range from biostatistics and modeling, through ecosystems functioning, global climate change, nitrogen and carbon cycling in temperate peatlands to taxonomy, ecology and biogeography of Rotifera, Cladocera and Copepoda. Bledzki has published over 90 peer-reviewed and popular-press articles.