Allan W. Shearer is an Assistant Professor at RutgersThe State University of New Jersey where he teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture.
His research investigates how individuals, communities, and societies create scenarios of the future and how these narratives and images of tomorrow are used to inform present day decisions. Focusing on issues relating to the built environment, his work has engaged both the expansion of the conceptual understandings about how scenarios can be understood and also the development of the practices by which they are used. He often works on applied projects involving interdisciplinary teams of planners, designers, environmental managers, and scientists to help decision makers explicitly engage their assumptions about the future and to anticipate the consequences of possible change.
A particular focus has been military lands and their unique role in contributing to both national securityby providing training and testing areasand environmental securityby sustaining the natural processes that contribute to a society's well being, such as clean air, clean water, and native biodiversity. Both kinds of security are vulnerable to the social and ecological pressures associated with regional urban and suburban growth, and one aspect of the investigations is understanding how these vulnerabilities are similar or different. The largest project completed to date was a 3-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) on possible futures for the region of Camp Pendleton and Miramar in Southern California. He is currently collaborating on a project to explore possible patterns of growth across the southwest United States.
Shearer's work has been published in an array of journals including the Landscape and Urban Planning, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, and the multidisciplinary Futures. His most recent book, co-authored with P.H. Liotta, Executive Director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina Univeristy, is Gaia's Revenge: Climate Change and Humanity's Loss. It
Shearer graduated from Princeton University and received his Master of Landscape Architecture and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.