Rachelle has been working for over ten years on the connections between land and people. She has learned about and from people and their places in Hawai’i, Chile, Bhutan, Washington State, and the Galapagos Islands. She holds an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University and a Master’s Degree in Forest Science from Yale University, and has worked with The Nature Conservancy and a variety of local governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Research Activities
Rachelle investigates the relationship between people and land, and particularly the intangible elements of that relationship. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the nexus of social science and ecology with a strong social science focus. Her work also involves the humanities, most notably artistic expression, religious studies, and ethics. Rachelle is passionate about community-engaged scholarship, and is particularly interested in communicating research in unconventional ways; learn more about her collaboration with a hālau hula based in Kona, Hawaiʻi to share her dissertation results at www.researchspeaks.org.
Her post-doctoral work, which sits at the intersection of learning theory, behavior theory, and work in social-ecological systems, focuses on how people learn about the environment in their everyday lives. She manages the Environmental Learning in the Bay Area project, which investigates this issue through focus groups, surveys, interviews, network analysis, and a series of case studies.
Her dissertation, which combined ecological and social science, focused on the “Cultural Ecosystem Services” (CES) that ecosystems provide to humans and on restoration ecology. “Cultural Ecosystem Services” is a term referring to ecosystems’ contribution to the nonmaterial benefits (e.g., experiences, capabilities) that people derive from human–ecological relations. Her work, past and current, informs attempts to operationalize CES, allowing them to be more incorporated into decision-making so that it can more adequately address considerations about land use that are frequently ignored. Importantly, these considerations are often issues that matter to vulnerable or otherwise underrepresented communities.
Rachelle’s works on restoration ecology addresses questions such as: how can we modify an ecological system so that it reaches a desired former state and/or supplies desired services? Restoration ecology provides a powerful example of the inextricability of social and ecological concerns, because the critical question of “what are we restoring to?” is answered based on societal goals. It is thus a fascinating entrée into explorations of the human-nature relationship, and all of the political, normative, and historical factors affecting it.
Working together with those outside of science and academia is extremely important to Rachelle, both in the creation and sharing of knowledge. In that vein, in January 2013 she managed a hula production inspired by and created around her research results; the show was presented to a standing-room-only crowd of 300 people.
Quote
When your two passions are how ecological systems work and how humans relate to those systems, finding a place to address those passions together is almost impossible. E-IPER has allowed me to try to combine two lines of academia that are often considered totally distinct. It’s challenging, but we’ll never know how they work together if we don’t try.
Teaching
- Public Scholarship and Social Change (Co-Instructor)
- The Environment in Context: Race, Ethnicity, and Environmental Conceptions (Teaching Assistant)
- Ethical Issues is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Teaching Assistant)
- Conservation Science and Practice (Teaching Assistant)
Education
- 2007 | Master's in Forest Science, Non-Timber Forest Products, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
- 2003 | Bachelor of Arts, Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard University
Publications
University Service
- 2010 - 2011 | "Navigating Interdisicplinary Waters" Project Team
- 2009 – 2010 | E-IPER Executive Committee Student Representative
- 2008 - 2009 | E-IPER Representative to the SES Graduate Student Advisory Council
- 2007 - 2008 | E-IPER Student Committee Representative
Links
https://people.stanford.edu/nmardoin/postdocs
http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/cgi-bin/ccb/
http://www.stanford.edu/~rgould