Eileen Crist's Home Page

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Eileen Crist Eileen Crist received her Bachelor's degree from Haverford College in sociology in 1982 and her doctoral degree from Boston University in 1994, also in sociology, with a specialization in life sciences and society. Her early research focused on animal behavior science and the ways scientists conceptualize, or avoid conceptualizing, the question of animal mind. Her interest in this topic was driven by the conviction that western discourses, heavily influenced by anthropocentric doctrines, have underestimated the real depths of animal awareness. She continues to hold an active interest in this topic, while increasingly devoting her energies to the foremost crisis of our time: the destruction of the Earth's biological diversity and wild places. This irreversible, far-reaching loss has not received sufficient attention in academic and public arenas, with so many people staying myopically focused on the economy, energy issues, ! ! ! depletion of resources, technological fixes, sociopolitical strife, and other strictly-human concerns. 

She has been teaching at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society since 1997, where she is advisor for the undergraduate program Humanities, Science, and Environment. She is author of Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind and coeditor of Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis. She is also author of numerous academic papers and contributor to the late journal Wild Earth. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia with her husband Rob Patzig.

 

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS AND EDITED VOLUMES:
2010 Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis. First editor. Co-edited with H. Bruce Rinker, Cambridge: MIT Press.  
2004 Scientists on Gaia: The New Century. Co-edited with Steve Schneider, Jim Miller, and Penelope Boston, Cambridge: MIT Press.  
2000 Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 245pp.  
PAPERS:
2010 Intimations of Gaia. In Gaia in Turmoil, Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, eds., MIT Press, 2009, pp. 491-522. PDF
One grand organic whole. In Gaia in Turmoil, Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, eds., MIT Press, pp. 2-32. (co-authored with ecologist H. Bruce Rinker.) PDF
Cloning in restorative perspective. Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past, Marcus Hall, ed., Rutgers University Press, 2010, pp. 284-292. PDF
2008 Against the social construction of nature and wilderness. In The Wilderness Debate Rages On, Volume II, Michael Nelson and J. Baird Callicott, eds., University of Georgia Press, pp. 500-525. (Reprinted from Environmental Ethics, 26(1):5-24, 2004.) PDF
2007 Beyond climate change: a critique of climate change discourse, Telos 141:29-55. PDF
2006

"Walking on my page": intimacy and insight in Len Howard's cottage of birds, Social Science Information 45(2):179-208.

PDF
2005 Rediscovering the king of woodpeckers: exploring the implications, Avian Conservation and Ecology, August 2005. 1(1): 6. [online] URL: http://www.ace-eco.org/vol1/iss1/art6/. (co-authored with Jeff Walters.) PDF
2004 Can an insect speak?  The case of the honeybee dance language, Social Studies of Science 34(1):7-43. PDF
Concerned with trifles? A geophysiological reading of Charles Darwin's last book. In
Scientists on Gaia: The New Century, Steve Schneider, Jim Miller, Eileen Crist, and
Penelope Boston, eds., MIT Press, pp. 161-172.
PDF
2003 Limits-to-growth and the biodiversity crisis, Wild Earth, Spring, pp. 62-65. PDF
2002 The inner life of earthworms: Darwin's argument and its implications. In The Cognitive Animal, Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burghardt, eds., MIT Press, pp. 2-8. PDF
Quantifying the biodiversity crisis, Wild Earth, Spring, pp. 16-19. PDF
1997 From questions to stimuli, from answers to reactions: the case of Clever Hans,
Semiotica 113(1/2):1-42.
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1996 Naturalists' portrayals of animal life: engaging the Verstehen approach, Social Studies of Science 26:799-838. PDF
Darwin's anthropomorphism: an argument for animal-human continuity, Advances in Human Ecology 5:33-83. PDF
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES AND REVIEWS:
2010 Cat's Cradle with Donna Haraway. Review essay of Donna Haraway's When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Social Studies of Science, August. PDF
2008 Social Ecology. Entry for The Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman, Editors-in-Chief, volume 2, Gale Press, pp. 253-258. PDF