University of Colorado Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bio

I am an Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. Before coming to Colorado, I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. I received my PhD in Geography at the University of Washington where I also served as a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow in Urban Ecology.

I am interested in environmental governance, particularly among interest groups at the development-conservation and science-policy interface. My research examines how environmental resources are planned, managed and experienced by policy makers, community groups and natural resource managers amidst scientific uncertainty, competing social needs/values and conditions of economic development. For my students and me, this requires not just describing the environmental issues we face today but also detailing how and why economic, political and cultural forces come to produce these outcomes and mediate the way we understand and respond to them.

Current research includes:

• Project assessing the process and development implications of mobilizing household cooking technologies in western India (and around the developing world) in order to advance various social and environmental initiatives including climate change mitigation policies
• Project exploring how conditions of vulnerability to wildland-urban interface fires in the U.S. West are more than indicators of risk and exposure but are also produced over time and space through complex environmental and economic growth histories
• Project evaluating emerging issues in urban/rural water reclamation projects in the U.S. West, including the major social/ecological hindrances and enabling factors influencing water reuse project implementation
• Project examining the contradictory relationship between the outdoor recreation equipment industry, the Leave No Trace environmental ethics program, ethical consumerism and protected area conservation.

Select Publications

G. Simon A. Bumpus, P. Mann. 2012. “Assessing Win-Win Scenarios at the Climate-Development Interface: Challenges and Opportunities for Cookstove Replacement Programs Through Carbon Finance” Global Environmental Change 22 pp. 275-287

P. Alagona and G. Simon, 2012. “Leave No Trace Starts at Home: A Response to Critics and Vision for the Future” Ethics, Policy and Environment 15:1

H. Bischel, G. Simon, T. Frisby, D Luthy. 2012. “Management Experiences and Trends for Water Reuse Implementation in Northern California” Environmental Science and Technology 46 pp. 180-188

G. Simon and S. Dooling. 2012. Urban Vulnerabilities: Cities, Nature, Development. Aldershot UK, Ashgate Publishing (Equal Editorship)

G. Simon. 2012. “Development, Risk Momentum and the Ecology of Vulnerability: A Historical-Relational Analysis of the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm” In, Cities, Nature, Development: The Politics and Production of Urban Vulnerabilities. Eds. S. Dooling and G. Simon. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, UK

G. Simon and D. Biehler. 2011. “The Great Indoors: Research Frontiers on Indoor Environments as Active Political Ecological Spaces” Progress in Human Geography 35:2 pp. 172-192 (Equal Authorship)

G. Simon. 2011. “The 100th Meridian, Ecological Boundaries and the Problem of Reification.” Society and Natural Resources 24:1 pp. 95-101

G. Simon. 2010. “Mobilizing Cookstoves for Development: A Dual Adoption Framework Analysis of Collaborative Technology Innovations in Western India” Environment and Planning A 42 pp. 2011-2030

G. Simon and J. Graybill 2010. “Geography in Interdisciplinarity: Towards a Third Conversation.” Geoforum 41: 3 pp. 356-363

P. Alagona and G. Simon. 2010. “The Role of Field Study in Humanistic and Interdisciplinary Environmental Education.” Journal of Experiential Education 32: 3 pp. 191-206

G. Simon. 2009. “Geographies of Mediation: Market Development and the Rural Broker in Maharashtra, India.” Political Geography 28:3 pp. 197-207

G. Simon and P. Alagona. 2009. “Beyond ‘Leave no Trace’” Ethics, Place and Environment 12:1 pp. 17-34

J. Graybill, S. Dooling, A. Greve, V. Shandas, J. Withey, G. Simon. 2006. “A Rough Guide to Interdisciplinarity: Graduate Student Perspectives.” Bioscience 56: 9 pp. 757-763

Courses Taught

ENVS 1342, Introduction to Environment and Society
GEOG 4/5420, The Politics of Nature
GEOG 4/5440, Science, Policy and the Environment
GEOG 4/5580, Urban Sustainability: Perspectives and Practice