Professor Wayne Hayes: Current Projects

Professor Wayne Hayes offers two on-line summer courses for the School of Social Science and Human Service at Ramapo College:

  1. World Sustainability ENST20951: see syllabus, schedule, and wiki Bulletin Board;
  2. Public Policy ENST20750: see syllabus, schedule, and wiki Bulletin Board.

I am active in the development of the Masters of Arts of Sustainability Studies at Ramapo College.

Sabbatical Project, Fall 2010

This meditation on sustainability addresses this Statement of Concern: This is what I believe will define globalization and World Sustainability over the coming two decades:

The habitation of the Earth by humanity cannot be sustained. Earth's natural systems have already begun to break down under the stress of human activity, a process that will intensify over the next two generations or so -- nobody quite knows when -- with catastrophic consequences, unevenly distributed among peoples and regions. While this calamity could be prevented and while many will strive to provide remedies, the very forces, ideologies, interests, and institutions that create this global crisis will obfuscate critical remedial discourse and will thwart the diverse efforts toward restoration of vital social, economic, political, and ecological systems. The ongoing efforts to forestall spiraling collapse will thus likely fail. The resulting trauma will be appalling and possibly irreversible.

An alternative path presents itself, based on a holistic notion of sustainability applied worldwide. World Sustainability requires that symbiosis and interdependence replace hierarchy, conflict, and avarice, among the hallmarks of established globalization. This alternative vision of World Sustainability amplifies a generative conception of cosmopolitan citizenship coalescing within an expanded civil society. While such a vision has discovered its roots, those in power will strive to extinguish its flourishing.

The detritus of social and ecological decay may provide nourishment to sustainability, but the poisons of distortion, barbarism, militarism, and plunder will also intensify. The outcome of this dialectic remains fluid but uncertain. The despoilers now have the upper hand.

This statement does not say that the path to World Sustainability is unknowable or unfeasible, but that it is actively being blocked. The path, therefore, can be unblocked.

This dire and broad statement should be examined, its implications explained, and, most significantly, the vision of an alternative defined. Of special concern here is how to interpret this statement in practice, defining a practical and strategic approach to sustainability worthy of the stakes and the challenge.

The sabbatical pursues two goals, rooted in the knowability and potentiality concluding the statement above:

  1. My upcoming Sabbatical project offers a synthesis that attempts to ground sustainability within an ontology and also tries to invent strategic sustainability interventions through civil society organizations, public policies, and green business models and practices. This framework updates and envelopes the paradigm of Sustainable Development and envelopes it in classical social ecology. This web site collects my work in anticipation of a book on these subjects.
  2. As part of the effort to rethink the foundations of sustainability, I will offer an upcoming course as part of the Master of Arts in Sustainability Studies at Ramapo College, Economics of Sustainability. This project builds on my approach to the Economics of Sustainability.

This daunting project recognizes that authentic sustainability must transcend the presumptions and pre-history of partial paradigms that now render the term sustainability elusive and ambivalent. World sustainability evokes a substantial and rapid historical conversion at a civilizational level. (See my Statement of Concern.)

My Background and Experience

I hold a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. My field work, typically advocacy planning, encompassed housing and community development, community organization, land use planning, environmental protection, and, above all, economic development. My dissertation at Cornell University documented the process of the development of Liberty Harbor in Jersey City, NJ.

I joined the Ramapo College faculty in 1973, just after the college was founded. I originally taught in the School of Metropolitan and Community Studies, but shortly thereafter joined the School of Environmental Studies. My courses include World Sustainability, Public Policy, the upcoming Economics of Sustainability, Environmental Internship, and Ecology, Economics, and Ethics. My Business of the Environment course, offered for the Ramapo College MBA, awaits the revival of that program.

Through the 1980s, I served as the founding Trustee of the Jersey City Economic Development Agency, a not-for-profit corporation that contracted to become the official economic development authority of Jersey City. The agency successfully delivered on that mission.

Through the 1990's, I served as President of Local #2274 of the American Federation of Teachers at Ramapo College. This placed me on the Council of New Jersey College Locals and on its Executive Board and its Committee on Political Education. I currently serve as a Trustee of the Cranford Public Library and as an adviser to the Barack Obama Green Charter School, Plainfield, NJ.

ProfWork Home Page | © Wayne Hayes, Ph.D. | ™ ProfWork | whayes@ramapo.edu
Initialized: 06/09/2010 | Last Update: 06/14/2010