Taking on the Most Vexing Issues of the Third World
Jeffrey Vincent Brings an Economist’s Perspective to the International Impacts of Tropical Forest Logging and ‘Brown Clouds’
by Monte Basgall
The scholarship of Jeffrey Vincent, the Nicholas School’s Clarence F. Korstian Professor of Forest Economics and Management, has taken on some of the most vexing issues of the developing world.
Those range from his thorough analyses of the international impacts of tropical forest logging to a prizewinning assessment of how mega-polluting “brown clouds” are changing Asia’s climate and agriculture.
While gloom and doom might be the anticipated outcomes, some of his economics-oriented perspectives offer surprising glimmerings of hope. That’s especially the case for Malaysia, a current focus of interest where he finds a vigorous middle class is pushing sustainability and environmental ethics in the face of rapid growth.
The trim, peripatetic Vincent finds himself racking up high frequent-flier credits as he travels again and again to assess on-the-ground situations. “I joke with my students that I live in the U.S. but don’t really work here,” he said in an interview soon after returning from another such trip. “Aside from teaching, my research is abroad,” he added, dressed in tropical shirt and sandals for Durham’s own summer heat.
Relocating to Duke in 2007 after six years at the University of California at San Diego’s Graduate School of International Relations & Pacific Studies, he brings more than two decades of experience in the economics of natural resource management and policy in developing countries, with an emphasis on forests, agriculture and water in Asia.
He has led or participated in projects sponsored by international organizations that include the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, USAID (United States Agency for International Development), the U.N. Commission for Sustainable Development, the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Much of that work was done during 11 previous years at a Harvard University contract research organization that sent him to locales ranging from Malaysia to Kazakhstan, Romania and far eastern Russia.
Vincent arrived at Duke after an intellectual odyssey that began in Millbury, Ohio, the very small rural town where he grew up in the 1960s.
“I long had an interest in the outdoors and did a lot of camping, hiking and canoeing,” he recalled. “But Ohio was also a state that was famous for pollution. The only business in my town besides farms was a landfill. My family’s own well got contaminated when I was growing up. So I also got interested in the environment.”
Additional interests quickly accumulated during his undergraduate years at Harvard: “developing countries” from his social anthropology major, and “the tropics” from his two-year job after graduation, which included botany field work in Costa Rica for one of his Harvard professors.
photo captions: Jeffrey Vincent Photos by Les Todd; Malaysia Photos Courtesy of Jeffrey Vin