Nature-Society Studies

The Nature-Society Studies (NSS) group at Michigan State University investigates how people interact with their natural environment. Such interactions include not only the manner in which humans impact nature, but also the way in which nature affects society by enabling or constraining economic activity, demographic mobility, and cultural exchange. Nature-Society Studies have a long history in geography, and are of growing importance to the discipline -- and beyond -- given widespread concerns that the human species are now transforming natural systems on a global scale through climate change, tropical deforestation, desertification, the pollution of our oceans, and urban sprawl.

At MSU, the NSS group addresses these many issues at scales ranging from the local to the global. For example, faculty and students seek to illuminate the anthropogenic nature of Amazonian soils, the human drivers of tropical deforestation, and the climate impacts of land use change in Africa. An emerging emphasis of the NSS group is in comparative study across broad world regions including Africa, Latin America, Asia, and North America. Solving environmental problems requires a geographically flexible perspective, given the generality of the degradation processes and a societal need to address them with the facts.

In conducting their research, faculty and students in the NSS group deploy a variety of epistemologies and research methods, given the department's strongly held view that no single approach, paradigm, or discourse holds the golden key to comprehension. With the department's complementary strength in geospatial technologies, the NSS group is on the intellectual forefront in applying state-of-the-art computational technologies to their research questions. However, qualitative and physical geography methods are also employed, including ethnographic field techniques, social and soil survey research, and participatory appraisals.

The NSS faculty emphasizes a team approach to research, and close collaboration between faculty and students. A weekly theory workshop is held, and students are engaged as soon as possible in research. NSS faculty place high priority on early student publications in peer-reviewed journals, and on proposal submission to dissertation research programs, such as funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and NASA. Graduate students have received support from all three agencies as well as others, and have published in journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Economic Geography, Professional Geographer, Journal of Latin American Geography, and Human Ecology.

In sum, the NSS group is an enthusiastic collection of geography faculty and students who interact regularly among themselves, and with the university community at MSU, which is also very strong in this general area of intellectual interest. As such, the group represents a vibrant part of the department and university, and is a key component of the College of Social Sciences signature program entitled, "Society Environment Interactions," which combines expertise in Geography, Anthropology, and the Environmental Science Policy Program.

The NSS group is particularly interested in attracting graduate students who are interested in working in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and in combining fieldwork with geospatial analysis. MSU seeks to train the next generation of NSS researchers, who will need to be conversant across human and physical geographic paradigms, political economy and ecology, post-structuralism, and multiple research techniques. Support for graduate student research is generous at MSU, from both internal and external sources.