Dr. Tom Hudspeth was a professor of Environmental Studies and Natural Resources in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources from 1972 - 2015. Tom came to UVM to help set up one of the first university-wide Environmental Studies programs in the U.S., and served as Assistant Director and Acting Director of the Environmental Program, Chair of the RSENR Natural Resource Planning graduate program, and Interim Director of the Office of Community-University Partnerships and Service-Learning.
Tom's scholarly interest in sustainability addresses learning processes at individual and institutional scales that contribute to a more sustainable world. More specifically, for decades he applied insights of behavioral sciences to facilitate environmentally responsible behavior--that is, help people to become more environmentally literate and to live more sustainably.
Over the years Tom taught a wide variety of courses; most recently his courses were Sustainability Education, Creating Environmentally Sustainable Communities, and the graduate course Place-based Landscape Analysis and Sustainability Education. Earlier, he taught many of our core courses, as well as Environmental Education and Environmental Interpretation. Tom led 18 travel-study courses to Latin America--Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Brazil--addressing ecotourism as a tool for sustainability.
Tom and others have worked to gain recognition of the Greater Burlington area as a "Regional Center of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)" as part of the U.N. Decade for ESD, 2005-2014. (See article below.)
Tom is a George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award winner from UVM (2002), Excellence in Teaching Award winner from Vermont Campus Compact (2005), CUPS Outstanding Achievement Award winner from UVM (2010), Environmental Merit Award winner from Environmental Protection Agency (1996), and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany (1999). He is a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, a Sustainability Faculty Fellow, a Service-Learning Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Research on Vermont.
