Veronica Strang
Veronica Strang started her career as a freelance writer exploring environmental issues, which took me from the UK to the Caribbean and then to Canada. Projects with the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario led to involvement in the production of the 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future. This raised key questions for her about why some societies are better at living with the non-human world than others. Seeking answers to these questions, she signed up for a Master’s course in Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. This provided such an illuminating way of thinking that she continued down the road to a Ph.D. and life as an academic.
For the last 30 years, her research and consultancy work has been concerned with human-environmental relationships, in particular societies’ engagements with water. Every society has pressing water issues, so this has taken her all over the world, but her major ethnographic research has been in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Strang has worked with the water industry and multiple water using groups including indigenous people, farmers, miners, urban and recreational water users, conservation organizations, museums, and artists.
Her research also involves collaboration with diverse organizations ranging from local communities to the water sector, and to international bodies such as UNESCO, the UN, the World Bank, and the International Water Association. She writes for both academic and general audiences, as well as giving public lectures and interviews in a range of media.