Holly Jean Buck

Holly Jean Buck is an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. She works across geography, environmental science, and media studies to understand how people engage with emerging climate and energy technologies. Her research is interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral and has an applied, policy focus. She is the author of Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough (Verso, 2021), which focuses on phasing out fossil fuels, and After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso, 2019), which examines technologies for climate intervention.

At Radcliffe, she is working on a book titled “The Future Is Rural: Climate Change and Innovation in Rural America.” Our climate future is in the hands of rural communities, since energy and land use transitions hinge on new technologies and practices in rural places. This book explores communities across the United States that have tried to manifest new industries and technologies that they saw as “the future,” examining why efforts to summon the future through innovation in rural places succeed or fail.

Buck’s research has appeared in such scientific journals as Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Sustainability, and she was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. Her writing has appeared in Dissent, MIT Technology Review, New York magazine, and Noema. She holds a MSc in human ecology from Lund University, in Sweden, and a PhD in development sociology from Cornell University.