Timothy C. Weiskel
Co-Director - The Climate Talks Project
Biographical Background 
Tim Weiskel is co-founder and Co-Director, with William R. Moomaw, of the Climate Talks Project. He is trained as an historian and social anthropologist. He completed his B.A. at Yale University (magna cum laude) in 1969 and undertook graduate work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (VIe - Section) in Paris and at Balliol College, Oxford where he completed his doctorate (D.Phil) in 1977 as a Rhodes Scholar (New Hampshire, 1969). Mr. Weiskel has received research grants from the Danforth Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has taught African history, historical ecology, and ecological anthropology at Williams College, Yale University and Harvard University.
Dr. Weiskel has had field experience in Syria, Lebanon and throughout West Africa from Senegal to Gabon. In 1966-67 he worked as the West Africa Representative for the volunteer organization Operation Crossroads Africa, Inc. Since then he has returned to West Africa for field work among the Baule peoples of the central Ivory Coast. His field work and archival research on the history and anthropology of the Ivory Coast peoples led to the publication of French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration, 1889-1911 (Oxford University Press, 1980). Since then he has published several broader articles on the ecological legacy of European colonialism and modern development strategies. Over the last several years he has worked on the environmental implications of public policy choices, and he is principal author of the recent work, Environmental Decline and Public Policy: Pattern, Trend and Prospect (1992), based upon testimony he presented to the United States Senate.Dr. Weiskel created and directed of the Environmental Ethics & Public Policy Program at the Harvard Divinity School from 1989 to 1999, where he taught courses in environmental ethics and religious perspectives on the environment. From 1992 until 2002 he was the founder and Director of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, a university-wide program that invited members of all departments and graduate schools to reflect on environmental ethics in their respective fields. In addition he was the co-founder and he helps direct, the Working Group on Environmental Justice, of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. During the early 1990s Dr. Weiskel the Associate Director of the Pacific Basin Research Center of the Center for Science and International Affairs af the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard University. There he directed the International Trade and Environment Program. From 2001 to 2005 Dr. Weiskel was a Visiting Scholar at Emerson College's Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. He currently teaches courses on Environmental Ethics, Environmental Justice and Global Climate Change at Emerson College and Harvard's Extension School.
In his research and teaching at Williams, Yale, Harvard, Tufts and Emerson Tim Weiskel has developed innovative computer applications and software for conducting online social science research and generating published materials on the world wide web. To pursue this work, in addition to his graduate degrees in History and Anthropology, Dr. Weiskel completed a Masters of Library Science (MLS) in 1987 from Southern Connecticut State University. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Library Hi-Tech, and he consults on the development of multimedia curricular materials, executive training modules and public policy briefing documents focusing upon the relation between local, national and global environmental issues. In this context his research focuses on the ways in which the Internet has developed as an important new force in the emergence of trans-national civil society -- especially in environmental matters. He has devised database systems and "distance learning" programs to support his teaching on these topics, and as part of this work he maintains several Internet web sites at: http://EcoEthics.Net, http://EcoJustice.Net and http://Sprawl-Central.Com.
Further Biographical Material
Some Recent
Web-Accessible Publications