My journey
Greetings! You have reached the website of Diane Russell, practicing ecological anthropologist.
MY JOURNEY BEGAN IN 1986. After five years of study in Boston and Brussels, I arrived in the country called “Zaire”—now the Democratic Republic of Congo—to carry out anthropological fieldwork on agricultural market systems. Traveling from the capital Kinshasa to the city of Kisangani, I flew over vast forest areas and wondered what they were like beneath the canopy. How did the people live on the land? What was their relationship to the animals, the trees and the river? Decades later, I still focus on the Congo Basin and the intersection of rural development and ecology. I have since lived and worked in other parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. I helped design and evaluate many conservation and development projects, became a knowledge management guru, trainer and champion of evidence-based practice.
Photo: Flying across the Congo (Diane Russell)