I am a Human Geographer, with a PhD in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania, which places me on the quantitative side of the field, with strong training in statistics and economics. Thus, I consider myself a quantitative economic geographer. Having said this, the topical focus of my research agenda has been on Nature-Society studies. My interest in Nature-Society studies has taken me away from conventional economic geographic themes, and at this point I could just as easily be described as a land change scientist. Nevertheless, my commitment to Human Geography is strong, and my research always brings human geographic themes to bear on processes of land cover and land use change.
My most characteristic work to date integrates remote sensing, spatial statistics, and ethnographic field data into studies of land cover change processes. Since the early 1990s, I have led a number of field activities in the Amazon basin, studying the land use decisions of households, the spatial-processes of road building, and, most recently, the impacts of land reform on tropical forests. In addition to this work, I have maintained interests in classical land use theory (Walker and Solecki 2004), as well as spatial statistics (Walker 2003). Although I have worked primarily at the household level in the tropical forests of Brazil, I am presently scaling up in order to take a political ecological view of environmental change in Amazônia and elsewhere. With NASA funding, I am modeling land-climate interactions at basin-scale in the Amazon, and with NSF funding I am addressing the globalization of the Amazon’s cattle economy.
Many Human Geographers define themselves as critical social theorists, ala the so-called cultural turn and post-modernism. Unfortunately, critical theory sometimes conflicts with the positivism of quantitative methods, at least as it has been traditionally practiced. Having said this, I believe that both structural and post-structural approaches have much to offer, in Geography and the social sciences more generally. In this regard, I see myself as an emerging fusionist, someone who is not averse to combining quantitative approaches with concepts taken from critical social theory. Recently, for example, I have combined von Thunen with discourse analysis (Walker and Solecki 2004) and remote sensing with political ecology and the structuration theory of Giddens (Aldrich et al. 2006). I believe that great intellectual opportunity lies along this fusionist path, which I plan to continue following.
- Aldrich, S., Walker, R., Arima, E., Caldas, M., Browder, J., and Perz, S. 2006. Land-Cover and Land-Use Change in the Brazilian Amazon: Smallholders, Ranchers, and Frontier Stratification. Economic Geography, Vol. 82(3): 265-288.
- Walker, R.T. 2003. Evaluating the Performance of Spatially Explicit Models. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing. Vol. 69(11): 1271-1278.
- Walker, R.T. and Solecki, B. 2004. Theorizing Land Cover and Land Use Change: The Case of the Florida Everglades and its Degradation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 94(2): 311-328. [for the definitive version, please go to http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/]
Parrot Friend on the River Iriri
Home away from home - O Pedrão
Transamazon Highway