My anthropological career began in the early 1970s with an interest in agricultural development and the impact of Green Revolution technologies in Latin America. With the 1980s crisis of debt, drought, and default among US farmers, I shifted my research focus to study which kinds of farm strategies supported farm survival and the implications that had for thriving rural communities. In the late 1990s, my focus shifted to the urgent questions of climate change and sustainability, and I came to focus on efforts at Emory University as a tangible arena in which to understand and enact sustainable development more generally.  That grassroots effort to expand awareness and build institutional commitment to sustainability in one university led to other efforts in Atlanta and connections to other universities and colleges around the US.