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Homepage
 | Michael Zimmerman Center for Humanities and the Arts Tel: 303-492-1423 |
CHA website homepage: http://www.colorado.edu/ArtsSciences/CHA/profiles/zimmerman.html
Michael E. Zimmerman is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the
Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU, Boulder. Since his
undergraduate years, Michael has been concerned about anthropogenic
environmental problems. His research examines the metaphysical,
cultural, ethical, cognitive, political, and religious dimensions of
such problems.
Like many others in the field of
environmental studies, Michael maintains that a multi-disciplinary
approach is needed both to comprehend and to propose effective solutions
for environmental problems. Natural science is crucial for
characterizing, making predictions about, and providing alternative
scenarios regarding existing and emerging environmental problems.
Anthropogenic environmental problems, however, arise from human
activities that are usually best studied by researchers from the social
sciences, humanities, and the arts.
Although criticizing
the command-and-control attitude toward nature that has characterized
modernity, Michael has also warned of the dangers posed by the
anti-modernist attitudes that characterize some versions of
environmentalism. Michael asks: How to retain what is noble about
modernity, including the freedoms connected with politics, research, and
religion, while correcting its shortcomings, including serious
environmental problems?
In what has been called “post-normal” science, researchers must not only
deal with problems characterized by complexity and thus uncertainty, but
must also integrate multiple perspectives, many of which operate at
different scales, with different assumptions, and in light of different
value concerns. Environmental policy formation will become increasingly
effective as it develops the conceptual models needed to identify
crucial methods and perspectives and to show their relationships to one
another, as well as to specific problems.
Working
with Ken Wilber and Sean-Esbjörn Hargens, Michael is helping to develop
and apply one such integrative model to anthropogenic environmental
problems. This model will be presented in Integral Ecology:
Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World (2007),
co-authored with Hargens.
Please visit Michael's homepage at CU's Center for Humanities and the Arts.