Turner, Billie Lee, II (1945–)

Billie Lee Turner II helped reinvigorate a science orientation to human-environment relationships, initially by steering cultural and historical geographical topics shared with anthropology into the [Page 2892]subfield of cultural ecology and subsequently by leading the development of land change and sustainability science. Of his scholarly contributions, including the role of geography as a human-environment research endeavor, three deserve special consideration. First, his field research in Mexico and Middle America paved the way for a new understanding of ancient Mayan human-environment relationships by demonstrating the various cultivation and landscape practices employed by this civilization. His work provides the basis by which questions on the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization must be set. Second, he and his students helped develop the induced intensification thesis of smallholder cultivation in the contemporary tropics, demonstrating how outcomes linked to both Boserup and Malthus are possible. This thesis demonstrates how the ambient environment alters the outcomes of different levels of pressures on land use and how household response to these pressures is predicated on a fusion of market and subsistence factors. Third, he has been an international leader in the development of global environmental change and sustainability research, through the lens of what has become land change science. His team of researchers has advanced remote sensing and modeling assessments of tropical deforestation, demonstrating that vulnerability must address a coupled human-environment system and pointing the way toward the research challenge of discovering sustainable land architectures.

Turner earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974. In 1980, he joined the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, where he remained for the next 28 years, mentoring 40 PhD students and serving as the Higgins Professor of Environment and Society. For several years, he was director of Clark's Graduate School of Geography and the George Perkins Marsh Institute. He served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1995), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and Massachusetts Academy of Sciences (2008). In 2008, he became the Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society, School of Geographical Sciences, Arizona State University.