To mark World Environment Day 2021, RELX’s Global Head of Corporate Responsibility, Dr Márcia Balisciano, talks to Dr Dan Fiscus and Dr Brian Fath about this year's theme: Ecosystem Restoration.
Dr Dan Fiscus is an ecologist, food system researcher and sustainability scientist with the Research Alliance for Regenerative Economics (RARE). He has written and co-written scientific articles in soil ecology, ecosystem ecology, theoretical ecology, and regenerative economics. He has co-written two books in sustainability including Foundations for Sustainability: A Coherent Framework of Life–Environment Relations (2018). From 2007 to 2012, he was assistant professor in the Biology Department at Frostburg State University (FSU) where he taught and did research in forest ecology and sustainability. From 2012 to 2016, he served as Sustainability Liaison with FSU, led the creation of the President’s Advisory Council for Sustainability, and advised students who created the Student Sustainability Fee.
A co-founder and elected member of the Western Maryland Food Council (WMFC), Dan served as Council Coordinator 2019 to 2020. With the WMFC, he helped convene annual regional food system conferences and enlist interdisciplinary partners collaborating for food system change in Western Maryland. In addition to RARE, he currently works in data analysis and artificial intelligence for industry research and development.
Dr Brian D. Fath is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Towson University (Maryland, USA) teaching courses on Ecosystem Ecology, Environmental Science, and Human Ecology. He is also a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria) and since 2011 the Scientific Coordinator of IIASA’ s Young Scientists Summer Program. He has published over 200 research papers, reports, and book chapters on environmental systems modeling, specifically in the areas of network analysis, urban metabolism, and sustainability. He co-authored the books A New Ecology: Systems Perspective (2020), Foundations for Sustainability: A Coherent Framework of Life–Environment Relations (2019), and Flourishing Within Limits to Growth: Following Nature’s Way (2015).
Brian is also co-Editor-in-Chief for Current Research in Environmental Sustainability. He was the 2016 recipient of the Prigogine Medal for outstanding work in systems ecology and twice a Fulbright Distinguished Chair (Parthenope University, Naples, Italy, in 2012 and Masaryk University, Czech Republic, in 2019).
