Philip Loring is the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy and Society. He is a broadly trained ecological anthropologist with interests in food security and sovereignty, community sustainability, and environmental change. His research explores the various facing coastal communities—what unites them, what divides them, and what makes them sustainable, or not. He and his students have ongoing research in communities across Alaska and Western and Arctic Canada, as well as in Ecuador and Saskatchewan. His recent publications focus on the interplay of conflict, diversity, governance, environmental change in Alaska fisheries. He is active in the research community: he is President of the Arctic Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a co-lead for the “human activity” theme for MEOPAR, the Marine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response network; he is also a member of governance team of the Rural Policy Learning Commons, an international partnership network based in Canada; he is co-lead of the “Fish as Food” cluster for the Too Big to Ignore Network, and is a founding member of the North American Food Systems Network.

Phil holds a PhD in Indigenous Studies and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in Liberal Studies from Florida Atlantic University. Outside of work, he prefers any activity that gets him into the woods or on the open water, as well as reading and collecting comic books, and playing baseball. His website can be found at http://www.conservationofchange.org/ and he is active on Twitter as @conservechange.