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 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Thomas F. Thornton

Dr Tom Thornton

Position:

Director of MSc Environmental Change and Management

Contact:

e: Thomas.Thornton@ouce.ox.ac.uk
t: 01865 275877

Profile

As director for the MSc in Environmental Change and Management, I oversee the course and teach various options and modules. In addition, I am a senior research fellow at the ECI. My academic training is in social and cultural anthropology (BA Swarthmore College; MA, PhD University of Washington). Before coming to Oxford in 2008, I taught at Portland State University, Trinity College, Saint Lawrence University, the University of Alaska, and Beijing Normal University (Fulbright Lectureship). I also worked in government as an environmental resource specialist and as a consultant to Native American tribes.

My primary teaching and research interests are in human ecology, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, conservation, coastal and marine environments, conceptualizations of space and place, and the political ecology of resource management among the indigenous peoples of North America and the circumpolar North.

Research Interests

I belong to the Climate Systems and Policy and Biodiversity research clusters in the School of Geography and the Environment.

Currently, I have the following active research projects:

Herring Synthesis: Documenting and Modeling Herring Spawning Areas within Socio-Ecological Systems over Time in the Southeastern Gulf of Alaska (Principal Investigator, North Pacific Research Board, 2007-2009)

This project synthesizes information on the historical ecology of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), a foundation and bellwether species for North Pacific marine ecosystems. Many Alaskan communities with local and traditional knowledge (LTK) of herring fisheries claim that historical stocks were larger and spawning areas more numerous, but that over-harvesting, predation, disease, development, and environmental change have depleted them. While shifts in stocks and spawning areas have been reasonably well documented since 1980, no synthesis of the deeper archaeological, historical, and ethno-ecological records on herring spawning areas and their relation to local ecosystems has been carried out. Using existing records and community focus groups, we built an historical and spatial (GIS) database to: 1) identify the extent of historic and prehistoric herring spawning and massing areas; 2) link changes in herring spawn extent and intensity to environmental and human factors in the socio-ecological system; and 3) identify sensitive areas for protection and potential restoration of herring spawning.

More recently I have extended this research on marine ecosystems as part of Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, including networking with researchers involved in or developing similar ethnographic and historical-ecological investigations in the Canadian, Japanese, and Russian Pacific spheres, as well as the North Atlantic.

Project outputs include:


Indigenous-State Relations in Alaska and Beyond: Sustainable Livelihoods, Biocultural Diversity and Health since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) (Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation, $485,000, 2008-2011)

In September 2007, the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science Program funded this three-year project under grant #OPP-0715461. The objective of the project is to analyze how the creation of Alaska Native business corporations (spawned by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971) transformed institutional arrangements between Alaska Natives, state governments, ecosystems, and regional-global economies, and how these Native corporations have contributed to particular outcomes in indigenous groups' biocultural health as measured by indigenous and cross-cultural models of sustainable livelihoods and ecosystem services. The study compares development, socio-environmental change, and livelihoods in two separate biocultural regions: Bering Straits (Inupiat) and Southeast Alaska (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian), which are served by two regional and more than a dozen village corporations.


Dynamics of Circumpolar Land Use and Ethnicity (CLUE): Social Impacts of Policy and Climate Change (Co-Principal Investigator, US National Science Foundation, 2008-2012)

This project is funded under the International Polar Year Initiative. It examines how the impacts of rapid climatic change among the peoples of the circumpolar rim affect land use and ethnicity. Using anthropological fieldwork and semi-structured interviews of members of local northern populations in Alaska, Fennoscandia, and Russia, as well as their representative organizations and government resource managers, we aim to establish the current "rules of the game" with respect to definitions, eligibility criteria, and accompanying land and resource rights. Given the variety of different criteria by which states justify special resource allocations, such as ethnic heritage, form of livelihood, residency, or even population size, CLUE seeks to uncover negotiated and path-dependant patterns of ethnicity in the context of these evolving rules and increasingnatural resource pressures, rapid climate change and resultant “rationalizations” of livelihoods.


Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change (HABC) (Co-Investigator, Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation lead project funded through a partnership between the Department for International Development (DFID), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 2010-11)

This project's aim is to kickstart the development of appropriate conceptual frameworks, methods and integrated models for understanding human adaptation to change in biodiversity and related ecosystem services that can eventually be used to predict outcomes for biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in highly biodiversity dependent societies, and provide evidence for the utility of these outputs to a new network of researchers and policy makers. The building blocks for development of concepts, methods, tools and models are

  1. local information or knowledge systems and monitoring capacity;
  2. local valuation of biodiversity and related ecosystem services;
  3. integrating biological resources and ecosystem services into an understanding of livelihood processes;
  4. assessing perceptions, risks, needs, and ability to respond;
  5. under-standing biological and welfare outcomes and feedbacks.

The project joins partners from anthropology, economics and ecology/biology at Oxford, Kent and The University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, with partners from South Africa and India. Partners will jointly elaborate the conceptual framework in a first intensive workshop using a scenario building protocol. Then, teams incrementally develop and evaluate research protocols and methods and collect primary data in a field research site in the Western Ghats, and results are initially modeled.

View project website

Teaching

I direct and teach primarily on the Environmental Change and Management MSc course and offer an elective on Indigenous Peoples and the Environment.

Current graduate students include:

  • Rodrigo Arce
    Tradable sector development in tropical rainforests: risks and opportunities in the forest carbon era
  • Rodrigo Arce
    Certified forest industry diversification in the Bolivian Northern Amazon: escaping the staple trap in the forest carbon era
  • Abrar Chaudhury
    Costing community based adaptation to climate change
  • Daniel Cooper
    Under Mount Roraima: the conservation and development of a sacred landscape
  • Erin Freeland-Ballantyne
    Sustainability's paradox: petro-capitalism, climate change and indigenous resistance in northern Canada: the case for indigenous environmental governance
  • Alexis Gutierrez
    Market based incentives and fisheries management - are we targeting the right stakeholders to make them work?
  • Dominique Henri
    The integration of Inuit traditional ecological knowledge and western science in wildlife and resource management in Nunavut, Canada

Recent Publications