Billie Lee Turner II

Billie Lee Turner II (born December 22, 1945, Texas City, Texas, USA) is an American geographer, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and prominent among the third generation of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography. In August 2008, he took a position as the first Gilbert F. White Chair in Environment and Society at Arizona State University, where he is affiliated with the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and the School of Sustainability. In November 2015, he was named a Regent’s Professor, the highest faculty honor that can be bestowed by Arizona State University.

For most of his career (1980–2008) he taught at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. There, he served as Alice C. Higgins and Milton P. Professor of Environment and Society, and Director of the Graduate School of Geography.

Raised and educated in Texas, he is the first son of Billie Lee Turner, a noted synantheralologist (botanist studying Asteraceae). He has a B.A. and M.A. in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin (1968, 1969) and received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1974 for work on Mayan agriculture. He then taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for two years, and was based from 1975-1979 in the Department of Geography, University of Oklahoma before moving to Clark University in 1980 and Arizona State University in 2008.

Turner's contributions to knowledge have evolved from an interest in human impacts on the natural world. His early study was on the borders of archaeology and geography - the pre-Hispanic agricultural systems of the Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico (Turner, 1983; Harrison & Turner, 1978). This geographical and archaeological work fueled an interest in agricultural pathways and livelihoods more generally, particularly patterns of agricultural intensification. As an authority of agricultural systems, Turner produced several influential texts on the theory of agrarian change (Turner and Brush, 1989; Turner, 1974; Turner, Hyden & Kates, 1993).

...
Wikipedia