Emily Mertz

Emily Mertz is an Associate Teaching Professor with the School of Applied Professional Studies.  She is also a Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and a Green Project Management Global Ambassador. 

Her scholarship intertwines ethology, anthropology, and just conservation practices, focusing on how conservation, development, and human livelihoods are intertwined, but often are not pursued as joint goals. Understanding both the interdisciplinary aspects that affect social and economic stability in human populations and the conservation of biodiversity can help us embrace more sustainable practices to foster development that supports human communities, while also protecting biodiversity.  She examines how sustainable leadership can promote a societal change such that we move away from the perspective where economic growth is valued and takes precedence above all to one that both recognizes, and appreciates, the limits and value of natural resources in our environment and embraces just conservation practice.  The environmental challenges we are faced with today (e.g., climate change, renewable energy, sustainable food systems, deforestation, ozone depletion, ocean pollution, rapid extinction rates) are described as “wicked.” Wicked problems are difficult to explain, plainly define, have no one solution, and are often the result of other indefinable problems. Mertz is interested in how sustainable leadership and sustainable project management can engage participants to jointly confront wicked challenges and promote just conservation and development practices, aligning environmental sustainability and social justice.

Mertz has designed and taught courses in Anthropology, Organizational Leadership, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Project Management.  Her sustainability-focused courses support ASU’s Design Aspirations of Transforming Society, Engaging Globally, and Fusing Intellectual Disciplines.  In addition, her courses align with ASU’s role as an innovator in sustainability education. Mertz wants to play a role in empowering students to be agents of change by reinforcing the value of environmental sustainability in her courses such as, Leadership for Wicked Environmental Problems and Impact Analysis and Sustainability in Project Management.