Dr. Caroline S. Tauxe received an Anthropology BA from Yale University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. Her dissertation research concerned power, conflict and social change in rural North Dakota communities undergoing coal-based energy development. It was a pioneering work in what has since become the field of political ecology in environmental studies. Dr. Tauxe later conducted research in Brazil on middle-class life during hyper-inflation, and especially the challenges it posed to class identity and the morality of exchange. This study of the culture of inflation is newly relevant in the US today, where we are suffering the consequences of our own maladaptive economic culture, especially the lifestyle based on easy credit. After eleven years of university teaching and six years working in the field of Community and Youth Development in the non-profit sector, Dr. Tauxe returned to academia and is currently teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is working on her second book, serves as Interim Director of Le Moyne’s Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research (CURAR), and continues to be active in community arts development and environmental organizing. She is married, has two daughters, two cats and a hedgehog, and is both a martial artist and a fabric artist in her own time.