Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning and Co-director of the Workshop on Urgent Transitions
Raymond De Young’s life-long involvement in gardening and small-scale farming has led to his involvement in the U-M Sustainable Food Program. He’s a member of the UMSFP Advisory Board and faculty advisor to an SEAS Master’s Project at the campus farm.
His work is motivated by the realization that society must respond to diminishing material and energy abundance while also addressing the climate and ecosystem disruptions caused by its past consumption. This bio-physical reality is inevitable. What is not inevitable, however, is the nature of society’s response. While the resource descent being faced is historic, so too can be the response. Thus his teaching and research focus on three interrelated themes: (1) planning for foundational sustainability by urgently transitioning to the local, (2) motivating environmental stewardship by drawing on a wide range of motives including intrinsic satisfaction and the human pre-occupation with behavioral competence, and (3) since burned out people can neither live sustainably nor heal the planet, maintaining human well-being by using nearby nature as medicine.
He received his Bachelor’s (1974) and Master’s (1975) in engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. (1984) in Urban, Technological and Environmental Planning from the University of Michigan. He is on the editorial review board of Environment and Behavior and Ecopsychology, and he recently co-authored The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift (MIT Press, 2012, with Thomas Princen) which includes a collection of readings with a decidedly agrarian focus that point toward a peaceful and psychologically resilient transition to an era of biophysical limits and societal opportunities.
