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Hannah Gosnell, PhD

Home Institution: Oregon State University

Fields:

  • Human dimensions of climate change and biodiversity conservation
  • Inner transformations in sustainability science, education, policy, and practice
  • Regenerative agriculture
  • Rural sustainability

Current Positions:

  • Professor of Geography; College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University

My Driving Question

How can we transform exploitative food systems into systems of reciprocity, regeneration, and care for nature and people?

Scholar Project 

The global food system is driving some of the planet’s most urgent crises—from biodiversity loss and climate change to soil erosion, pollution, animal suffering, and human health problems. These harms stem from dysfunctional relationships—relations of domination over land, animals, and people that are common in modern industrial agrifood systems. In contrast, conscious food systems are intentional, regenerative, and values-driven, where decisions about producing, distributing, and consuming food are guided by awareness of interconnection with people, nature, and future generations. Operating from principles of care, reciprocity, and equity, conscious food systems ensure that human and ecological health, cultural vitality, and social justice are inseparable from food and agriculture.

Cultivating conscious food systems where modern industrial agriculture persists necessitates transformative change. As a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment (TCA), Hannah has contributed to a better understanding of strategies for addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline, including disconnection from and domination over nature and people. Modernist worldviews that consider nature as isolated entities to be exploited are at odds with the holistic perspectives of many Indigenous and relational worldviews which have in common a more complex view of reality. A growing body of scholarship suggests that a complexity lens informed by greater consciousness along with these more holistic worldviews is needed if we are to influence system dynamics as part of deliberate transformative change towards a just and sustainable world.  

Hannah’s work as a Nova Scholar will focus on deepening her understanding of strategies and actions capable of transforming societal views and values from relations of domination to relations of care (TCA Strategy 5) through meaningful collaborations with a dynamic network of thought leaders. A special issue of Earth Stewardship, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, will focus on actions associated with Strategy 5 including cultivating nature connectedness, shifting culture through new narratives, changing social norms regarding production and consumption, facilitating transformative learning, and cocreating knowledge for sustainability. 

Hannah will also apply TCA Strategy 5 concepts to her research on agrifood systems and human-animal-plant relations. Drawing on connections with diverse communities of practice and collaborators worldwide as well as decades of her own research, she will develop qualitative case studies of conscious food systems, highlighting the inner and outer dimensions of transformative change, and exploring new ways of communicating her science involving creative writing, storytelling, and new media. 

Drawing from unitive science, Indigenous wisdom, and systems thinking, this project will weave science with personal stories to explore how humanity can shift from fragmented, broken systems to a world awakened to complexity and connectedness, where diverse ways of knowing inspire systems change, regenerative relationships, and co-creation with Earth intelligence for collective and planetary healing.

Biography 

Hannah Gosnell is a professor of geography at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Her research focuses on transformations to sustainability, agricultural landscape change, rural sustainability, and land and water conservation from a social-ecological systems perspective. She is especially interested in how worldviews, laws, and institutions evolve to reflect changing geographies and under what conditions they can facilitate transformation in practical, political, and personal spheres. 

Her work reflects a belief that collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to conservation challenges involving all affected stakeholders are likely to be more durable and equitable than ones that are top-down or purely technical. Most of Hannah’s projects take place on rural, agricultural, working landscapes involving both public and private lands in the American West, and they all deal with various aspects of environmental governance—the processes of decision-making involved in the control and management of the environment and natural resources.

Learn more about Hannah.

Education and Training
  • PhD, University of Colorado, Boulder
  • MA, University of Colorado, Boulder
  • BA, Brown University
Selected Honors
  • Charles Bullard Fellow in Forest Research, Harvard University
  • Radical Center Researcher Award, Quivira Coalition
  • Positive Deviant, Wolf Willow Institute
Selected Publications

 

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.