Childhood on the Connecticut shoreline inspired Dorothy J. Howell (“DJ”) to proceed from ecology to environmental law to meeting the need to engage hearts and minds in service of the natural environment. She never strayed far from a fascination with Native America and the ultimate identity in exile: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Her mingled career and life path are paralleled in her publications listed here, with the novel Where You Can Hear the Sea and See the Sound, exploring our relationships to natural environments through formative places special to us – and what follows from the loss of those places. Her grounding in popular culture is further reflected in her Intellectual Property and the Protection of Fictional Characters, not “African Studies” but a still-useful guide to those who have created fictional characters who strike a chord with audiences.

The author’s career has taken her from applied microbial ecology in State government to environmental law as an Illinois Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Control Division and on behalf of two major corporations in the formative years of expanding federal pollution control programs. From that background she turned to academia, starting with a fellowship with Boston University’s Center for Technology and Policy followed by teaching and administration for Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center. From there she entered the first class of Antioch New England’s pioneering Environmental Studies doctorate while moving through an array of faculty situations in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut. Antioch fostered Where You Can Hear the Sea and See the Sound as her dissertation in keeping with the university’s call to reach out to audiences outside academia. For the last 15 years she has been an Adjunct Professor in Quinnipiac University’s First Year Writing Program.

Constants through the author’s life have been immersion in popular culture and seeking to educate others in the liberal arts, law and policy, and the crafts of reading and writing. In fact, she is most at home in reaching out to others in terms of what has come to be known as cultural ecology: human relationships with the world around us.

Childhood on the Connecticut shoreline inspired Dorothy J. Howell (“DJ”) to proceed from ecology to environmental law to meeting the need to engage hearts and minds in service of the natural environment. She never strayed far from a fascination with Native America and the ultimate identity in exile: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Her mingled career and life path are paralleled in her publications listed here, with the novel Where You Can Hear the Sea and See the Sound, exploring our relationships to natural environments through formative places special to us – and what follows from the loss of those places. Her grounding in popular culture is further reflected in her Intellectual Property and the Protection of Fictional Characters, not “African Studies” but a still-useful guide to those who have created fictional characters who strike a chord with audiences.

The author’s career has taken her from applied microbial ecology in State government to environmental law as an Illinois Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Control Division and on behalf of two major corporations in the formative years of expanding federal pollution control programs. From that background she turned to academia, starting with a fellowship with Boston University’s Center for Technology and Policy followed by teaching and administration for Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center. From there she entered the first class of Antioch New England’s pioneering Environmental Studies doctorate while moving through an array of faculty situations in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut. Antioch fostered Where You Can Hear the Sea and See the Sound as her dissertation in keeping with the university’s call to reach out to audiences outside academia. For the last 15 years she has been an Adjunct Professor in Quinnipiac University’s First Year Writing Program.

Constants through the author’s life have been immersion in popular culture and seeking to educate others in the liberal arts, law and policy, and the crafts of reading and writing. In fact, she is most at home in reaching out to others in terms of what has come to be known as cultural ecology: human relationships with the world around us.