SEFS director Dan Brown is a co-author on a recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that demonstrates how corporate farms, which have steadily risen in Africa, can displace small farmers leading to greater land inequity, poverty, and food insecurity.
The research highlighted how land use policies can reinforce existing inequalities. Food price volatility, land scarcity, and increasing land values in the early 2000s created an incentive for private companies to acquire farm and forest land. Sub-Saharan Africa was a hotspot of land investments, with commercial acquisitions often occurring in agricultural areas already in use by smallholder farmers. In nearby villages, some of these land-use interventions led to dispossession of land or displacement for local farmers, resulting in greater inequality. Households with the smallest land holdings bear the brunt of the impact of large-scale land acquisitions, according to the paper.
The study, which surveyed households surrounding large corporate farms in Tanzania, examined how land use change from commercial acquisitions led to significant consequences for livelihoods and development.
Sitting here in Anderson Hall at the end of my sixth Winter quarter at UW, I have an opportunity to reflect with gratitude and humility on the opportunity I’ve been given to serve another term as director of SEFS. I’m thankful to the entire SEFS community for making this job so rewarding. One aspect of that reward comes at this time in the quarter when student work is wrapping up and we see our students completing milestones on their path to completing their degrees. The end of any quarter is a busy and nerve-wracking time, but also a time for celebration of all the hard work that goes into creating new knowledge.
The work by our students, faculty, and staff on creating knowledge is central to what we do in SEFS, in the College, and at the UW. Among the stories in this newsletter and on our website, you can read about our work on human-wildlife interactions, human waste composting, and mitigating toxic waste and flood risk in disproportionately vulnerable communities. These are but three examples that highlight the transdisciplinary and engaged work we do in partnership with numerous agencies, tribes, and communities, partnerships that make our scientific and engineering work more innovative and impactful. These partnerships provide invaluable opportunities for our students to engage with potential employers and partners as they complete their academic work.
Speaking of Anderson Hall, I’m excited to report that renovation of this beautiful gothic building, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year, is at the top of the University’s priority list for renovation and is currently being considered for capital funding by the state legislature. The renovation will modernize spaces and technology to support our research directions and collaborations and enhance accessibility, safety, and comfort for our community. You can learn more about this exciting project on our webpage.
Taking a break from faculty hiring this year, we are engaged in planning for future hires with the needs created by recent faculty departures and our commitment to meeting future research and curricular needs in mind. We are planning faculty searches in the areas of sustainable bioresources engineering and ecological restoration and management during the next academic year, while also developing additional future hiring priorities. These positions will contribute to existing programmatic strengths in engaged research and education in both of these areas. The engineering position will contribute to evolving our BSE program toward an updated emphasis on process engineering and sustainability.
With the ability to gather again, we invite you to join us for the events noted in this newsletter, including the Sustaining our World lecture with Jerry Franklin (May 3), UW Danz Lecture with Robin Wall Kimmerer (May 11), and our annual end of the year awards celebration (May 17). As you read the sad news of emeritus Professor Bruce Lippke’s passing, note the opportunity to gather on March 26 at the Washington Park Arboretum to celebrate his life, career, and contributions. A number of us gathered at the Husky Union Building this month to celebrate the nomination of our administrator, Jenn Weiss, for the distinguished staff award, which is a university-wide distinction. The nomination recognized the critical contributions Jenn has made to a collaborative environment in the SEFS staff amid substantial change. Be sure to thank her when you see her!
No matter your connection to SEFS, we are interested in hearing from you. Keep in touch!
Dan Brown
Corkery Family Director’s Chair
Professor and Director
In my first quarter as director of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, I am so grateful for the warm welcome, and for opportunities to meet the committed students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends that make up the SEFS community. As I do, I learn more about the many ways in which the mission that attracted me here in the first place—“generating and disseminating knowledge for the stewardship of natural and managed environments and the sustainable use of their products and services”—inspires your work. I’m also energized as I learn about the opportunities we have to collaborate within the College of the Environment, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest region. We have an important mission, and together, we’re well positioned to make a big impact through our collective commitment and strong partnerships.
SEFS Director Dan Brown
Trained as a geographer and landscape ecologist, my research program takes a systems approach to understanding human-environment interactions and their implications for landscape and societal change. From that background, I’m particularly drawn to how scholars in SEFS confront the challenges of managing and stewarding environmental resources and their products using multiple strategies, perspectives, and disciplines. Our forests and landscapes are called upon to provide an increasingly diverse set of services in a globalizing, urbanizing, and warming world, and as a society, we face increasingly challenging choices about how to balance forest products, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, environmental justice, outdoor recreation, and human health, among others. I’m excited to work within the SEFS community as we lead efforts to advance knowledge discovery, application, dissemination, and integration, across science and engineering, natural and social processes, and many audiences of learners, to address these environmental challenges and support societal decision-making.
SEFS graduate programs are superb platforms for developing scientific and engineering expertise, as are our undergraduate tracks within the ESRM and BSE curricula. Importantly, the ESRM degree has long been structured to provide a foundation for integrated understanding of sustainability across economic, environmental, and social dimensions. My own experience with systems thinking has drawn me to sustainability science as a lens through which such integration can productively occur, and I am inspired by the leadership SEFS has shown in curricular innovation on this front. Further, SEFS and College of the Environment are also leaders in immersive learning, getting students into the field, into labs, and into internships so they can work on real problems, and in critical efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the environmental sciences. Our engagement with state, federal, tribal, and community partners, numerous field facilities, and partnerships with EarthLab and other units of the College of the Environment provide many avenues for SEFS faculty and students to confront complex social, environmental, and economic issues and sets the stage for innovative sustainability thinking and problem-solving.
It is the commitment of communities like those in SEFS, College of the Environment, and the UW that keep me hopeful in the face of big challenges. I’m so happy to be a part of them, and invite you to join us.
Dan Brown
School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
