Presenters

Dr. Garrity is a systems agronomist and research leader whose career has been focused on the development of small-scale farming systems in the tropics. He is currently Drylands Ambassador for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi. He served as Director General of the Centre from 2001 to 2011. He is currently leading an effort on the perennialization of agriculture in the 21st Century, building more productive and environmentally sound farming systems through a global Partnership to Create an EverGreen Agriculture. He also chairs the Steering Committee for Landcare International, a worldwide effort to support grassroots community-based natural resource management.

During the 1990s he was based in Indonesia where he launched and developed the Southeast Asia Regional Programme of ICRAF. As Head of the Farming Systems Program at the International Rice Research Institute, and as a Professor at the University of the Philippines in the 1980s he advised 47 PhD and MSc students and post-doctoral fellows from Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, and published over 175 journal articles and books. Dr. Garrity has a BSc degree in agriculture from The Ohio State University, an MSc in agronomy from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, and a PhD in crop physiology from the University of Nebraska. When visiting Washington from his base in Nairobi he invites other WRI motorcycle enthusiasts to join him on the backroads of Maryland and Virginia and get a few bugs in their teeth.

David has over 20 years of experience in natural resource management including several years working in Asia on large-scale natural resource management and biomass energy projects. Before joining RECOFTC, David served as the Chief of Party on SERVIR-Mekong, a joint initiative between USAID and NASA aimed at developing geospatial data to respond to the environmental and disaster needs of the region. Prior to SERVIR-Mekong, David was Chief of Party on USAID’s Lowering Emissions in Asia’s Forests (USAID LEAF) programme. From 1999 to 2002, David worked as an Assistant Project Officer at RECOFTC headquarters. He is a graduate of two distinguished forestry institutions, University of California at Berkeley and Yale University, which promote multi-disciplinary decision-making through strong communication and teamwork skills. He has successfully taken these skills into project management of international organizations including TNC, FAO, IUCN and WWF in China and Southeast Asia

Javier Mateo-Vega is the Global Director of Partnerships & Communications at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Prior, Javier served as Director of the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) of the Yale School of Environment, holding a joint appointment at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama). He also held positions at The Nature Conservancy and the Organization for Tropical Studies, both in Costa Rica. Javier is a PhD Candidate (Biology) at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), and his research focuses on understanding the drivers, constraints and trade-offs for forest conservation in pluralistic landscapes, shared by Indigenous peoples and farmers. He works primarily in eastern Panama, including the Bayano region and Darien Gap, areas known for their magnificent forests and rich cultural diversity. 

Javier has more than 20 years of experience providing technical and managerial leadership in natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, capacity development, and ecological research in developing countries. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders Program. A native of Costa Rica, Javier has lived in 10 countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe, and is an avid surfer and art collector.

Dr Pauline von Hellermann is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths University in London. Her research on landscape change, policy and crisis narratives in Nigeria and Tanzania sits at the intersection of political ecology and historical ecology. She currently holds a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship (2018-2021) with​ the project Red Gold: A Global Environmental Anthropology of Palm Oil. Her publications include numerous journal articles, Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (Routledge 2011, edited with Simon Coleman) and Things Fall Apart? The Political Ecology of Forest Governance in Southern Nigeria (Berghahn 2013). 

I’m an environmental anthropologist with experience in consultancies, newspaper reportage, NGOs, teaching and training, and independent research. I joined USM in 2010. My primary research focuses on the environmental knowledge and relations of local communities, especially Southeast Asian tropical forest dwellers. My long-term work is with the mobile, hunting-and-gathering, forest-dwelling Batek (Orang Asli) of Pahang. This study developed into an abiding interest in the knowledge and knowing of landscapes and in indigenous epistemologies.I’ve also conducted fieldwork with Khmer and Kuay communities in central Cambodia. There I switched my attention from forests to hydrological systems, and from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture, and investigated contemporary classifications of religious sites in the pre-Angkorian templescape of Sambor Prey Kuk monument complex. I’m currently preparing a book of photographs depicting the agricultural cycle in my field village. I continue to be interested in forest management and politics, vulnerability and climate change adaptations, the politics of knowledge, Southeast Asian societies and cultures, and the Orang Asli and other indigenous minorities of Malaysia.

I have studied war-torn Burma’s Kachin region since 2010, focusing on nationalism and nature. My first publications are now (slowly) coming out, including on the Chinese Myitsone mega-dam project, on Kachin popular nationalist worldviews, and on the anthropology of nature conservation. My doctoral research explored how struggles over nature led the Kachin ethnonational movement to encounter Burmese ethnic majority activists and Western biodiversity conservationists.

An environmental engineer by training, Efren Nango has taught bilingual courses and seminars on agro-ecology, the socio-economic environmental development of Amazonian nationalities, purposeful leadership, and theology. He has worked as a director for social projects of the Christian church, as an environmental management technician is psychosocial projects, was an administrator of the Jatun Sacha Biological Station in Ecuador, and is currently the education leader of CONFENIAE, an organization that represents the twenty-three indigenous organizations of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Ana María is doctoral candidate at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin, with a focus on the oil urbanisms of Ecuador. In the year 2010, she received a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies from the GSD for her proposal to develop an open research network devoted to study the infrastructural integration of South America and provide alternative models of intervention, in lieu of the primarily entropic urbanization that follows the deployment of extraction infrastructures, particularly highways. The network became the South America Project and was spawned in close collaboration with Felipe Correa. Ana María has taught design studios and research seminars at PUCE, Harvard, Columbia, University of Michigan, UC Temuco; and has been teaching fellow at the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She curated the XV Quito Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities, was National Curator for the IX BIAU, and academic advisor for the UN Conference Habitat III. She is currently a member of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon (SPA) convened by the SDSN and the UN.