Jay R. Harman
Professor Emeritus of Geography
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Department of Geography
Biography: Having joined the ranks of emeritus faculty on 1 July, 2009, my academic engagement nonetheless continues but on a reduced scale, with regular offerings of GEO 432, Environmental Ethics, as well as occasional field trips to the Smokies, as noted above. In addition, shortly before retiring I was instrumental in creating a Web version of GEO 330, U.S. and Canada, (with generous assistance from other Departmental personnel) and I anticipate maintaining some role in helping to keep it current. Otherwise, I find personal balance through involvement in bee keeping, working on manuscripts, writing letters to newspaper editors defending a liberal point of view, gardening, looking for further ways to reduce our family’s carbon footprint, and, most of all, sharing my life with my wife and our two growing daughters. Research Interests: Over the length of my career, my research and teaching interests were in physical geography, with concentrations in plant geography (mostly of the eastern United States) and synoptic climatology, often in some combination. During the latter portion of my career, however, I became increasingly interested in matters of philosophy, especially epistemology and ethics/ morals, particularly as they interfaced with my Department specialization in the physical environment, and this interest was the eventual inspiration for me to begin writing and speaking about environmental ethics in more formal venues, such as professional journals (see recent publications) and in the classroom. To accommodate this new focus, the Department inaugurated GEO 432, Environmental Ethics, at my initiative in the 1990's. Currently, nearly all my scholarship and writing fall into this concentration, and I no longer engage in plant geography and synoptic climatology scholarship. E-mail: harman@msu.edu Office: |