Karl Zimmerer is an American geographer whose research focuses on the environment-society dynamics of agrobiodiversity, the biodiversity of food systems, and land use. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Environment-Society Geography at Pennsylvania State University.
Zimmerer was born in 1958 in New York City and raised in New Jersey, where he graduated from Ocean Township High School. His maternal grandparents emigrated from Lemkovyna in western Ukraine in the early 1900s.
He received a bachelor's degree in biology and physics from Antioch College in 1980. As an undergraduate, he held research internships at the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Montana, the Uplands Research Laboratory in the Great Smoky Mountains, and the Land Institute in Kansas. He later earned master's and doctoral degrees in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 and 1988. His doctoral research examined food biodiversity and environment-society relationships in agricultural systems in the Peruvian Andes.
Academic career
Zimmerer began his academic career in 1988 as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1990, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was promoted to professor in 1996. In 2007, he became a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2025.[1] He has held cross-appointments in Ecology, Rural Sociology, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies programs.[2]
Zimmerer has been a research fellow at the Wisconsin Humanities Institute and the universities of Yale, Harvard, and Montpellier, France.[3]
Zimmerer co-led the Environment and Development Advanced Research Circle and chaired the Departments of Geography at Wisconsin (2002–2007) and Penn State (2007–2014). He was editor of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers from 2004 to 2013.[4] Currently he is the Editor of Urban Agriculture[5] and directs the GeoSyntheSES Laboratory.[6]
Research
Zimmerer’s research explores the interactions between biodiversity, food systems, and land use, with a particular focus on the Andean region, including the cultivation and use of over 4,000 varieties of potatoes.[7] His work examines how social-ecological sustainability is shaped by local knowledge and practices related to consumption, plant and animal care, soil and water management, seed systems, and cultural frameworks such as Buen vivir ("Living Well"). He investigates the ways in which these practices are influenced by broader factors such as national and global development policies, urbanization, land-use intensification, migration, conservation efforts, and public health considerations.[8] His research highlights both the resilience and the vulnerabilities within these socio-ecological systems.[9]
CLAG Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award (2024)[15]
Selected publications
Selected books
Zimmerer, K. S. (1996). Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihoods in the Peruvian Andes. University of California Press.[16][17]
Zimmerer, K. S. & Bassett, T. J. (2003). Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geography and Environment-Development Studies. Guilford Press.[18]
Globalization & new geographies of conservation. University of Chicago Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-226-98343-1.[19]
Zimmerer, Karl (2019). Agrobiodiversity: Integrating Knowledge for a Sustainable Future (1st ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262038683.[20]
Selected articles
Zimmerer, K. S. (1991). "The regional biogeography of native potato cultivars in highland Peru." *Journal of Biogeography* 18: 165–178.
Zimmerer, K. S. (1994). "Human geography and the ‘new ecology’: The prospect and promise of integration." *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 84: 108–125.
Zimmerer, K. S. (1998). "The ecogeography of Andean potatoes." *BioScience* 48: 445–454.
Zimmerer, K. S. (2000). "The reworking of conservation geographies." *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 90: 356–370.
Zimmerer, K. S., Galt, R. E., & Buck, M. V. (2004). "Protected-area conservation (1980–2000)." *Ambio* 33: 514–523.
Zimmerer, K. S. (2012). "The indigenous Andean concept of kawsay." *Publications of the Modern Language Association* 127(3): 600–606.
Zimmerer, K. S. (2013). "Agricultural intensification in a global hotspot of smallholder agrobiodiversity (Bolivia)." *PNAS* 110(8): 2769–2774.
Zimmerer, K. S., & de Haan, S. (2017). "Agrobiodiversity and a sustainable food future." *Nature Plants* 3: 1–3.
Zimmerer, K. S., Tubbeh, R. M., & Bell, M. G. (2024). "Early colonial monocropping and subaltern agrobiodiversity." *The Journal of Peasant Studies* 51(3): 624–650.
↑ Rudel, Tom (2007). "Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation edited by Karl Zimmerer". Environmental Conservation. 34 (1): 87–88. doi:10.1017/S0376892907283808.
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