Tim Duane in Papua New Guinea

Tim Duane, '82, MS '83, PhD '89, is professor emeritus of environmental studies at UC-Santa Cruz. He is also an attorney with more than four decades of professional experience in the fields of energy, climate, land use, natural resources, water, and environmental policy, planning and law. Tim now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and has lectured on water, climate, and energy law and policy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Stanford School of Engineering. He has been a faculty lecturer on Stanford Travel/Study trips to India, Southeast Asia, Iceland, Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, the American West, and Southern Africa and also on another dozen trips for Cal Discoveries. His love of travel was first inspired as a Stanford junior studying in Cliveden during his junior year.

On this trip, Tim will discuss cultural isolation and agricultural innovation; conservation and capitalism; and the impact of climate change on the region’s coral reefs. He will do so within the context of the provocative (and controversial) question that Jared Diamond raised about PNG in his 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: why do some places have more “cargo” than other places? In Diamond’s analysis, the answer is driven primarily by ecological and geographical factors. Diamond’s critics offer a less ecologically deterministic explanation that focuses on social structures and human agency. We will explore these competing views.

• Senior fellow, Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, University of Utah, 2022–2024

• Professor in residence, 2018–2022, and visiting professor, 2013–2018, University of San Diego School of Law

• Professor, environmental studies, UC-Santa Cruz, 2009–2018 

• Associate professor: environmental planning and policy, UC-Berkeley, 1991–2009

• Visiting professor: Seattle University School of Law, 2012; and Vermont Law School, 2008–2012 

• Author, Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West (UC Press, 2000) 

• BA ’82, human biology, MS ’83 and PhD ’89, civil engineering, Stanford University 

• JD ’06, environmental law, UC-Berkeley