Jerry Hembd, Ph.D, is known about town because of his involvement with the Master Gardeners and Master Naturalists programs that provide education and training for people who, in return, do public service work. Many have helped establish native plant gardens and actively remove non-native invasive plants.
Hembd is the incoming president of the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalists, the largest regional chapter in the state, with 380 members.
Less well known is that Hembd has been teaching, researching and publishing scientific papers on economic sustainability for decades. He has worked in the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Myanmar. Recently he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach and collaborate on economic sustainability in the Maldives, southwest of India in the Indian Ocean, one of the more vulnerable countries in the world to sea level rise caused by climate change.
“I have dedicated considerable energy throughout my career to all things associated with the sustainability imperative,” Hembd said. He is professor emeritus at the School of Business and Economics, University of Wisconsin-Superior.
“These included formal and informal education, significant supporting work through nonprofit organizations, applied research, community-based efforts, and professional advocacy,” he said. “These efforts have not waned since my formal retirement in 2017; they have simply taken on new forms.”
Hembd’s work will involve enhancing the educational, curricular, and research capacity of the Maldives National University Business School (MNUBS), specifically in sustainable development. In addition to teaching courses, he will be working to support curriculum development, and facilitate applied research/learning via student advising, course-related topical papers, and faculty consultation. His work will be tailored to support longer-term development and sustainability in Maldives.
“Maldives is a new democracy with a long, distinct cultural and religious identity,” Hembd said. “It is navigating a transition where opportunities and challenges abound. Climate change and rising sea levels are examples of global sustainability challenges with local impacts, particularly for a small island state like Maldives, which is the flattest country on Earth.”
There are more than 1,200 islands in the Maldives. Most residents are Muslim, whose religion forbid drinking alcohol and eating pork. Yet in the past 15 to 20 years, tourism has become the country’s most important industry. It started with luxury resorts occupying their own island where drinking is not prohibited and women guests are not required to follow to traditional dress restrictions. They can wear bikinis, for example.
“It is high-end tourism and follows a one-island-one-resort model,” Hembd said. “Each resort occupies its own island and is isolated from the rest of the country. Tourists arrive at the international airport and are taken to their island resort where people pay between $600 to $3,000 a night to stay at these luxury resorts in incredibly beautiful natural areas. The resorts produce their own power and desalinate their own water. It is a really unusual model.”
Recently relaxed rules no longer restrict tourism to previously uninhabited islands and a one-island-one-resort model. This has opened the way for guesthouses, often provided by local residents, on inhabited islands. Hembd said these contrasting approaches yield differing impacts, not just on the local environment but on the surrounding communities and the people that inhabit them.
As one of the lower countries in the world, the Maldives are on the front line of climate change impacts; they are one of the first countries expected to be submerged by rising sea levels.
“I am very interested in how they are thinking about and responding to the climate change impacts they are already seeing,” Hembd said. “The island my wife, Brita, and I will be living on is being partly reclaimed. They are working to build it up higher so people can live on it longer even as the sea level rises.”
In addition to teaching, he believes he has a lot to learn from the residents in Maldives regarding their frontline challenges and their attempts to adapt.
“These lessons can and should be passed on to others, as well,” Hembd said.
Hembd said sustainable development encompasses economic development but places it within a broader, science- and systems-based multidisciplinary and multigenerational context.
Ecological economics sees the human economy as a subset of the global ecological system within a science- and systems-based transdisciplinary and multigenerational context.
“Sustainable development has four primary dimensions—society, environment, culture, and economy—that are intertwined and interdependent,” Hembd said. “My sustainable development course will be tailored to complement the MNUBS economics program and focus on sustainability questions and issues of specific importance to Maldives.”
The backdrop for the proposed courses is the ongoing paradigm shift within the economics discipline, where sustainability is becoming increasingly relevant due to forces such as climate change, growing inequality, and the environmental and social costs of economic growth. Students will be challenged to come to their own conclusions through readings, discussions, short topical papers, and applied issue/research papers.
Hembd is particularly interested in how religions impact economic sustainability. He previously worked in the Philippines, which is majority Catholic; India, which is Hindu; Vietnam, which is largely atheist; and Myanmar, which is Buddhist. This will be his first opportunity to work with Muslims.
Hembd considers himself a pragmatic optimist when it comes to climate change.
“I don’t think things are going to continue as they are, but I don’t think it is the end of humankind,” he said. “Human life will look a lot different in 100 to 200 years. I am not concerned with overpopulation as much as how we use resources and how we treat the environment. Inequality is probably a bigger issue than overpopulation. Population wouldn’t be as pressing an issue if we knew how to share our resources more equitably. Our whole relationship with consumption is what probably needs the closest attention.”
Hembd will be in the Maldives for four months before returning to Arkansas, where he will continue working on local sustainability projects.
“I’ve been really impressed with the people I have met through Master Naturalists,” he said. “It has surprised me how many environmental activities are going on. Quite a few people are putting a lot of time and effort into it. I find it really encouraging.”