Myriem Le Ferrand is an environmental policy researcher and conflict resolution facilitator. Cases involve water, food, energy, and outdoor recreation. She has worked in the environmental and natural resource field for over thirty years. She specializes in organizational learning, place-based research and appreciative inquiry to strengthen local voice through peer-reviewed social fieldwork.
Ms. Le Ferrand holds a MS from the University of Michigan in Natural Resource Policy. Her research focused on interdisciplinary approaches to conservation. She holds a BA from University of Colorado in Economics. Her research in the late eighties focused on strengthening family farms through farmer surveys and cost-modeling of best practice on small-scale organic family farms.
Her career emerges as a journey of good intention met with the need to rethink and recalibrate. She trained as a steward of the environment, only to discover in each “environmental” position, her paycheck was funded by industry with profit at the fore. Her career is one of self-correction, learning and redirection now for over thirty years. First, she provided CERCLA superfund fate and transport litigation support to industry. In 1990, as Senior Analyst, she calculated the initial EPA standards in market-based mechanisms to reduce SO2 emissions in U.S. coal-fired electric generation. She published cross-cultural expatriate training workbooks at the advent of desktop publishing. As an international researcher, she evaluated public participation in conservation in Africa and South America. Along the Colorado Front Range, she studied outdoor recreation and community-based ecosystem stewardship. Funded by the EPA, she provided economic and environmental planning and oversight for watershed management and rewewable energy in the Four Corners. She worked with tribal authorities and a range of stakeholders as air quality declined rapidly in the revival period of hydraulic fracturing. Her studies are available upon request by donation to Economics for Peace Institute.
For the past ten years, she has undertaken extensive research as participant observer in the rural economies of the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. She worked in the food and tourism industry along various levels of the supply chain from serving craft beer in a community hub pub to bookkeeping for a yacht rigger to providing service learning for young organic farmers and bringing technology to the management of a regional CSA. She also worked in online boutique fashion retail and got muddy with the natural building community. During this time, she developed business, building and site plans for artisanal farm villages. In 2020, she is returning to ADR fortified by what she has learned. Fully informed by this broad experience, she is able to set the stage for stakeholders to identify and work toward common goals.
A partial list of publications is found under Sustainability Research link, including those conducted through the University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.