Michael Paul Nelson is a professor of environmental philosophy and ethics at Oregon State University. From 2012 until 2022 he held the Ruth H. Spaniol Chair of Renewable Resource and served as the lead principal investigator for the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program—the first non-scientist to hold such a position. He serves as the Philosopher in Residence of the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Project, the longest continuous study of a predator-prey system in the world, and a senior fellow with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Though trained as a philosopher and ethicist, Nelson has proudly become almost completely “undisciplined” in his teaching and scholarly work. He collaborates with scholars from all fields of inquiry—ecologists, social scientists, artists, writers, and beyond. He teaches courses with titles like Critical and Creative Thinking and Environmental Ethics and Imagination. Nelson is the author of a couple of hundred articles and essays on a wide variety of topics in and around environmental ethics, and is the co-editor or co-author of four books, most notably Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril with the writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore.
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