Resource planning professor Susan Todd to retire

Susan Todd poses with her graduate student, Sam
Adams, and his son, Orin, during a retirement party.

Susan Todd, an associate professor of resource planning, will retire at the end of the year.

Todd has been with the University of Alaska Fairbanks almost 30 years. Her research with the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station has focused on conflict resolution, mediation and public land use planning. She researched methods to involve the public in environmental decisions and facilitated public discussions on resource issues, such as caribou and wolf management and trails development.

Todd coordinated a Peace Corps program at UAF from 2005-2016. Through the program, graduate students studied natural resource management at UAF and served in the Peace Corps. Their master’s projects reflected resource issues in the countries they served. She also coordinated the Coverdell Fellows Program, which provided educational support for returning Peace Corps volunteers who studied natural resources management at UAF.

Todd's interest in international environmental issues led to a Fulbright sabbatical in Namibia during the 2011-2012 year, studying wildlife conservation.

As part of the UAF Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Todd taught natural resource conservation and policy, resource management planning and management, and environmental literature. She recently published two journal articles with her graduate students, one on deforestation in Togo and another on training women to maintain village water supplies in Ghana. She also worked with a student on a book chapter about what variables predict whether a city will be successful implementing sustainability measures.

Before coming to the university, Todd worked for several state and federal agencies, including the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, the Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service. While working for the DNR as a planner in the early 1980s, she realized that conflicts over resource management were frequently not about the data but about different values. For example, agricultural interests might want land cleared to plant, she said, while forestry representatives might want the forest left as it is.

“We argued about values,” she said. The desire to resolve such environmental conflicts inspired her to return to school at the University of Michigan to earn a doctorate in environmental mediation.

Todd doesn’t have any immediate retirement plans, except for a couple months soaking up sun in Tucson and Baja, Mexico. She wants to spend more time reading and dancing, two things she likes to do, but she expects to stay involved in Alaska resource discussions, particularly because of the impacts of climate change.

She also plans to stay connected to the university, remaining as the committee chair for her current graduate students and will serve as the major advisor for a new doctoral student from Mongolia.