Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E)

Rooted in the disciplines of ecological economics at UVM and anthropology at McGill, L4E supports innovative scholarship that bridges academic and community-based knowledge. PhD Fellows earn their degrees through existing doctoral programs at each institution, engaging in a vibrant intellectual community of students, faculty, postdoctoral researchers, visiting scholars, activists, and Indigenous thinkers.

Inspired by Ecozoic inquiry - a vision of mutually enhancing relationships between human societies and the wider community of life - L4E at UVM fosters scholarship that explores economics through the lens of sustainable scale and just distribution over efficient allocation.

L4E works toward the Ecozoic era through four key areas:

1. Facilitating transdisciplinary research that empowers emerging leaders;
2. Building a research-to-action network that connects theory with practice;
3. Engaging in advocacy and creative communications; and
4. Reimagining teaching and learning across campuses and communities.

Fellows participate in a range of collaborative activities - both in person and online - including joint courses, research-to-action projects, retreats, collaboratories, workshops, creative media, and co-authored publications and presentations.

For more information about L4E, visit Leadership for the Ecozoic.

To apply for a Fellowship, go to the Fall 2027 Application. 

Faculty accepting L4E Fellows include: Matt Burke, Joe Ament, and Josh Farley. Please find their research statements below.

Matt Burke: Current and developing research activities aim to investigate ecological political economies across the region of Northeastern North America and social dimensions and applications of urban and rural agroforestry and livelihoods. Additional topics of interest may include low-tech energy technologies and energy sufficiency, and transdisciplinary methods and methodologies including case-based, participatory, and community economies research. I am currently contributing to projects on urban and temperate agroforestry, collaborative watershed governance, and bioregional learning and mapping.

Joe Ament: Joe will be recruiting a student to focus on monetary and macroeconomic dynamics of ecological economics and degrowth. His work is currently focused on inflation but he is also actively interested in the macroeconomics of degrowth in countries with non-Core currencies, housing inflation, tax policy, monetary policy in inflationary environments, public banking, and the role of finance as a barrier to a degrowth transition. He is interested in using regression, system dynamics models, case studies, and building conceptual frameworks where strong theory does not exist. Anything involving macroeconomics and degrowth is likely something he is interested in exploring and funding. 

Josh Farley: Josh will be recruiting a student interested in one of three topics below, or ideally in a cross-cutting approach to all three. 

1. The most serious problems currently facing humanity are social dilemmas. He is particularly interested in the evolution of cooperative solutions to social dilemmas through the lens of multi-level selection theory (MLS).  MLS maps closely onto many enduring cultural traditions, such as Ubuntu and the indigenous cultures described in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, and extends to the right relationship between humanity and rest of nature.  

2.  Food and energy systems play a major role in driving humanity past most of the planetary boundaries, yet market distribution is so inequitable that many people fail to obtain enough to satisfy their basic needs.  Josh is interested in non-market alternatives (i.e. systems that prioritize use value, not exchange value) tofood, energy, and other essential resources required to satisfy basic needs, broadly defined to include agroecology.  

3.  Most money is loaned into existence as interest-bearing debt by the for-profit financial sector, which drives highly destabilizing positive feedback loops and favors the present over the future.  He is interested in theorizing alternative financial systems focused on use value over exchange value with an emphasis on practical proposals for implementation. Possible applications include the finance of housing and farming.   Adjacent to this, he is interested in how the monetary system could be used to drive a jubilee, a dramatic reduction or elimination of all outstanding debt.  

L4E focuses on ecological economics and degrowth.  The fields are both quite broad and cover many specific topics and we will consider applications that show an interest in any aspect of ecological economics or degrowth. Under this broad umbrella, current research focuses on monetary theory and policy, sustainable agricultural production, resource management, energy transitions, political ecology, market dynamics, climate change transitions, labor, commons, rural development, land use, food systems, and many more topics. If your specific research interest does not perfectly align with the topics indicated by the faculty above, feel free to apply more broadly to L4E and explain your focus. Applications benefit from contacting a prospective advisor, so we encourage you to reach out to an SDPEG faculty member whom you believe might be a good fit for your research. 

Questions can be directed to julie.starr@uvm.edu.