On this episode of Doomer Optimism, Dr. Ashley Colby (@RizomaSchool) and Dr. Jason Snyder (@cognazor) sit down with Dr. Josh Kearns, an environmental chemist and engineer with a specialty in appropriate technologies for low-resource settings.

About Dr. Josh Kearns

My mission in life is to use environmental chemistry and engineering to understand and repair ecological harms and empower marginalized peoples.

I’m a born-n-bred Appalachian and a native of West-By-God-Virginia and damn proud of it. I studied chemistry and environmental engineering at Clemson (BS), biogeochemistry at Berkeley (MS), and environmental engineering at CU-Boulder (PhD). I’ve spent years bumming around rural and remote communities in Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, India, Nepal, Ladakh, Sri Lanka, and Mexico, and generally tried to make myself useful while doing so.

I’m the Director of Science for Aqueous Solutions, and the Chief Technical Advisor for Caminos de Agua, grassroots water and health development organizations in Thailand and Mexico, respectively.

I taught environmental engineering courses at NC State University for a couple of years before returning to my roots as a freelance renegade scientist and exponent of ecological transition engineering. I live with my amazing wife Rachael and all our critters on a small mountaintop homestead in southern Appalachia.

About Dr. Jason Snyder
Metamodern localist | homesteading, permaculture, bioregional regeneration | meditation, self inquiry, embodied cognition | PhD from Michigan State University, faculty Appalachian State University.

About Dr. Ashley Colby
Ashley is an Environmental Sociologist who studied at Washington State University, the department that founded the subdiscipline. She's interested in and passionate about the myriad creative ways in which people are forming new social worlds in resistance to the failures of late capitalism and resultant climate disasters. I am a qualitative researcher so I tend to focus on the informal spaces of innovation. She's the founder of Rizoma Field School and Rizoma Foundation.

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