Faculty and Staff - Waring
Tim Waring
Office: 200 Winslow Hall
Phone: (207) 581-3157
E-mail: timothy.waring@maine.edu
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Human Ecology, University of California, Davis
B.S., Biology, Haverford College
Research Areas
Sustainability, Cultural Evolution, Human Culture and Cooperation
Interests
I study human culture and cooperation, especially in relation to the environment. I study the evolution of culture to better understand how norms, traditions, and societies evolve, and how they are influenced by ecological forces in order to learn how to better build durable, sustainable and just institutions. Ultimately, cultural forces create the identities and patterns of meaning which control trust and cooperation between people and groups, putting culture at the heart of economic and ecological outcomes. I hypothesize that cooperation is a central feature of sustainable and durable human-ecological systems. On a broader level, I am fascinated by the fundamental differences between biological and cultural evolution, and the resulting implications for the interaction of the two systems.
Research
I try to attack the questions what makes human systems change, and what makes socio-ecological systems stable with fieldwork, economic experiments, and theory and modeling. In the lab, I use behavioral experiments to study human behavior such as social learning and cooperation in order to better understand cultural dynamics. In the field, I study socio-ecological systems, such as the management of yellow star-thistle in California rangelands, and the effects of inter-ethnic relationships on cooperation in irrigation management in Southern India. I plan to create new socio-ecological systems theory using mathematical and computational modeling. I have published articles in Ecological Economics, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, Evolution and Human Behavior, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Rangeland Ecology and Management, and Research in Economic Anthropology.
Course Syllabi
* ECO 381 Sustainable Development
* ECO 581 Socio-Ecological Systems Modeling