John J. Metz

Department of History and Geography
Northern Kentucky University
448 Landrum
Highland Heights, KY 41099

Office Phone: 859.572.5462
Department Phone: 850.572.5461
FAX 859.572.6088
email: metz@nku.edu

I have always been a curious person, anxious to see what is over the next hill. My curiosity has led me over a lot of hills. Several long periods living in villages in Iran and in Nepal have exposed me to cultures very different from my own, but have also convinced me that people everywhere struggle to improve their family’s lives in social settings which are fundamentally similar to our own, where both honest and dishonest people abound, and where a person’s class strongly affects the opportunities he or she has.

I came to the Geography Program of Northern Kentucky University in 1990 after completing my PhD and MS degrees at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and teaching for a year at the UW’s Whitewater campus. At various times throughout my life I have discovered new ways of thinking about myself and the world I inhabit. Often these have been transformations of conception and understanding, pattern shifts in how I perceive and understand the world I inhabit. Realizing that there are profoundly different ways of understanding our world has always tickled my sense of irony and awe.

Curiosity, altruism, and a desire for adventure led me into the Peace Corps after I completed my BA degree. I went to Iran, spent the first of my scheduled two year term learning language, culture, and how to do my job as an agricultural extension agent. My second year was busy and fun as I used what I had learned during the first year of suffering to create a busy work schedule, so I stayed for an additional 15 months to cash-in on my first year of learning.

This time in Iran offered many opportunities to see the world from different perspectives. One of the lessons I learned was that to understand a culture you must live it. Aspects of the culture that I originally disliked, because I viewed them with my US cultural biases, I came to appreciate as I performed the social rituals that effective communication demanded. I grew to love the close connection to nature that peasant life entailed. I grew to rely on Persian friends for social support. I got good enough at language and culture to elicit surprise and appreciation.

Readjusting to US culture was as hard as learning Iranian culture had been. There were so many layers of manufactured materials and gadgets between American consumers and the natural systems on which they unconsciously rely. There was so much waste and wanton consumption: the society seemed to be based on waste.

After returning to the US, I worked with emotionally disturbed children in therapeutic camps and then in outdoor education with disadvantaged children. As I did these jobs, I realized that I wanted to learn more about how nature functioned, so I began taking courses in biology, chemistry, and geology. While exploring graduate programs, I discovered Geography as a discipline that would allow and encourage me to integrate biological and physical science with social science, as I studied human-environmental interactions. My MS research examined environmental relations and dynamics of beech (Fagus grandiflora) forests in eastern Wisconsin. For my PhD research I decided to return to Asia to Nepal to study forest use patterns and the processes of deforestation.

My PhD studies confirmed my suspicion that power relations within societies are the most significant forces affecting environmental and other social decisions. Deforestation in Nepal turned out to have much more complex social roots than the commonplace Malthusian explanation allowed (see discussion in my Research section). Moreover, as a Geographer I recognize the importance of scale: I came to see most issues as existing within a nested hierarchy of forces. Local problems have local actors contending over some major issue, but the local situation exists within the context of the regional and national government. The national government, in turn, exists within the context of the global economy and global political-economic institutions. To understand the local problem, we must know precisely what is occurring in that local environment, but we must also know how government policies intensify or mitigate the problem and how international processes influence the government policies and local actors. Take Amazonian deforestation as an example. Locally, rich land owners convert forest to cattle pastures with the labor of the poor and unemployed. But these ranchers are only economically viable because the government has given them tax deductions for their investments and land for free - even though the land was already occupied and "owned" by indigenous peoples, who are killed or driven off. The idea of cattle production in the rainforest came from western development "experts." The process was made possible by World Bank funded roads. Development theory of free trade as well as loans and the resulting debt force Brazil to promote export crops, like beef. Deforestation is the result of all these forces interacting at all these scales.

So, I now spend my time teaching classes and squeezing in research when I can. I try to present my students with an alternative view of the world - one that makes sense of my experience, but I emphasize to them that mine is only one interpretation. Indeed, one of the main points I seek to convey is that the assumptions we begin with often determine our conclusions. Critical thinking means being able to identify the assumptions that a speaker or an argument is making. Learning our own personal assumptions is key to self understanding and often to personal growth.