PhD training for new era of thought leaders.

Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) is a global partnership currently based at McGill University and the University of Vermont that aims to define and facilitate a transition to the Ecozoic, a future founded on mutually-enhancing human-Earth relationships. L4E’s overarching goal is to reform higher education by offering alternative ways of learning, thinking and acting.

L4E aspires to imagine and enable the Ecozoic by:

• advancing transdisciplinary scholarship to educate and empower new leaders;
• co-creating a global research-to-action network; and
• mobilizing and focusing higher education’s resources and influence on reversing multi-faceted, human-induced, planetary declines in life support capacity.

We hold that higher education has a moral imperative to redirect itself from training individuals for “temporary survival” in the Anthropocene to “educating students for the emerging Ecozoic” ; therefore we focus on transforming how normative disciplines such as law and governance, economics and finance, ethics and religion are conceptualized and taught.

Students admitted to L4E are well positioned to critique and develop alternatives to the structure and worldview of predominant human systems; upon graduation, students are prepared to be change-makers in key positions of influence in academic, government, and advocacy organizations. L4E education elements include research teams on Ecozoic pathways, immersion in place-based partnerships and research-to-action domains, and opportunities to test, learn, and share solutions through a global network of campuses and civil society partners. L4E emphasizes integrative science of socio-ecological system analysis, transdisciplinary research methods, strategic communication frameworks, and social movement mobilization and leadership.

In fall 2018, we welcomed our first cohort of 11 diverse international students. In addition to taking four core courses, students are co-creating the L4E vision by engaging in strategic working groups in cooperation with our emerging global network.  

The partnership builds on McGill’s and UVM’s strengths in Ecological Economics, and an Economics for the Anthropocene (E4A) partnership, which includes about 40 graduate students, 80 collaborators, and 25 academic, government and NGO partners. For further information on L4E, read L4E’s Strategic Plan.

For more information, please contact L4E’s Project Manager Dina Spigelski.