Cornell University

Senior Extension Associate, Natural Resources

Civic Ecology Lab Associate Director

Agriculture & Life Sciences

About

Tidball is a Senior Extension Associate in the Department of Natural Resources where he serves as Associate Director of the Civic Ecology Lab and Program Leader for both the Nature & Human Security Program and the Communities and Urban Forests Extension Program. He is also the New York State Coordinator for NY Extension Disaster Education Network. Tidball's research is focused on the interactions between humans and nature in the context of disasters and war. He is particularly interested in how these interactions relate to social-ecological system resilience, or in other words, how humans and their interactions with nature are related to a system`s ability to bounce back after being disturbed. Tidball's extension and outreach work is organized around the "greening in the red zone " concept - bringing the individual, societal and ecological benefits of community-based environmentally sustainable practices to disaster preparedness, relief and mitigation. Tidball approaches this work as a hybrid anthropologist/ecologist and draws heavily from fields such as ecological anthropology, social-ecological systems resilience theory, environmental psychology, and international relations theory. Sub-disciplines and areas of interest include Community Forestry, Community-Based Natural Resource Management, Ecological Engineering, Cultural Anthropology and Symbolism, Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management, SSTR (Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction), and the Human Security paradigm.