Stephanie Pincetl

I am a Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. I grew up in rural San Diego County and in France (Paris and Aix en Provence, where I participated in May ‘68, and fell in teen-age love). I watched with horror the transformation of the San Diego region’s landscapes into endless suburbs, linked by asphalt pavement and freeways, erasing the ecosystems, topographies, wildlife and native people’s histories. Influenced by McHarg’s Design with Nature, Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, and the coherence of the French city-rural relations pre-hyper modernization, I have been on a quest to recapture human scale, respect for nature, and new pathways to ensure equality and dignity for humans in their daily lives. Land use is a key ingredient to living well and to urban equity.

I have used my privileged position at the University to conduct research on environmental policies and governance aimed to produce ‘science in the public interest.” I believe that institutions, and their rules (all made up by humans) construct how natural resources and energy are used— and often exploited — to support human activities, while also exploiting many populations in so doing, treating them as subaltern.

I am committed to bringing together interdisciplinary teams of researchers across the biophysical and engineering sciences with the social sciences to address problems of complex urban systems and environmental management. Only by this type of integrated, interdisciplinary research can we begin to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of humans and nature today.

I have has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, urban metabolism, water and energy policy. I received funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct collaborative research with biophysical scientists on urban ecology and water management in Los Angeles, as well as from the California Energy Commission to develop a methodology to understand energy use in communities in California coupled with social policy considerations (see www.energyatlas.ucla.edu). I have also conducted extensive work on water in Los Angeles County (www.waterhub.ucla.edu) with my colleagues, coming to the conclusion that if water was managed as the precious resource it is, there would be enough for the region to be largely self reliant. This would involve landscape change to reflect the Mediterranean ecosystems of the area, making the extensive ground water resources common property resources, recycling waste water, and reinfiltrating as much storm water as possible (depave LA!). The biggest challenges are institutional and attitudinal, not those of the H20 molecule itself. Importing water would continue, but in high rainfall years. And all of this would be less costly than continuing to rely on imported water. . .

My book, Transforming California, the Political History of Land Use in the State, (now old in academic terms) is still the definitive work on land use politics and policies of California.

I was co-lead on the urban chapter of the National 2nd State of the North American Carbon Cycle Report, out in 2018, uncensored by the Trump Administration.

My PhD is in Urban Planning from UCLA. I spent 10 years working in the nonprofit environmental justice sector and has taught in the Masters of Public Affairs at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris. I am also the Faculty Director of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC), a Los Angeles regional organization dedicated to working across jurisdictions to achieve a better future. I was instrumental in making the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA its institutional home