Associate Professor of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy
Thomas Princen conducts research and teaches in the field of natural resource and environmental affairs with a focus on the concept and social goal of sustainability, local to global. Research topics have ranged from the transnational relations of environmental NGOs and the distancing of commerce to overconsumption, ecological rationality, and sufficiency. He is now working on the politics of urgent transition with projects on localization, fossil fuels, and industrialism.
In his writing he aims to develop a language of sustainability and positive transition, in his teaching and speaking to promote active learning and engagement. Teaching has included courses on institutions for sustainability, the history and political economy of food, fuel and water, and the challenges of global transition.
Princen is the author of The Logic of Sufficiency (2005), Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order (2010/2013) and lead editor of Ending the Fossil Fuel Era (forthcoming) and Confronting Consumption (2002), all published by MIT Press. His current project, The Origins of Limitlessness and the Seeds of Sufficiency: The Politics of This Transition, explores transition as a long-term process of discontinuous societal change brought on by resource constraint, as “endings” in the dominance of fossil fuels, industrialism and commercialism, and as “beginnings” in organizing to live within our means.
