Frederic O. Sargent - Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities

FREDERIC O. SARGENT studied at the universities of Mexico, Paris, and Wisconsin, earning a Ph.D. in land economics at the latter. He taught at the universities of Colorado State, Texas A. & M., Guelph, Ontario, and Vermont. At Vermont he was Chairman of the Department of Resource Economics, director of the University Resources Research Center, and head of the masters program in Rural Planning. He has published four books on rural planning and has supervised development of thirty land-use plans. He has served on planning commissions in Fort Collins, Colorado; Guelph, Ontario; and South Burlington, Vermont. Professor Sargent is now a planning consultant specializing in lake watershed planning.

PAUL LUSK , AICP, Associate Professor in Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico, teaches courses in site, environmental, water- and energy-conservative design and graduate professional practice studios in rural environmental planning, community, and urban design. He has twenty-eight years professional experience in neighborhood, village, pueblo, city, and comprehensive regional planning in New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. For the past twenty years he has conducted independent research in small-scale, intensive farming, animal and aquaculture production, wildlife habitat enhancement, and environmentally sustainable community development.

JOS A. RIVERA is Associate Professor of Public Administration at the University of New Mexico where he teaches seminars on Rural Community Development, Social Policy and Planning, and The Practice of Policy Development. He also serves as the Associate Director for Latin American Programs and teaches rural development courses to graduate students from Central and South America. Formerly he was Executive Director of the Home Education Livelihood Program, Inc., a statewide community development corporation in New Mexico. In addition to his teaching assignment at the university, he presently serves as the Director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, an interdisciplinary research unit.

MARA VARELA is a rural planner and community organizer who has, since 1963, worked with African-American, Mexican-American, and Native-American rural communities organizing toward economic, political, and social empowerment. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Community and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. In 1990 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her lifes work, including her participation in the founding of Ganados del Valle, a private not-for-profit economic development corporation in northern New Mexico featured as a case study in this book.