Deseret Weeks, a lecturer in the Environmental Studies Department, is a critical geographer who works at the intersection of multiple disciplines to address socio-environmental crises and injustices related to the global economic system. Her research is not confined to a single field but draws on a wide range of disciplines to provide a comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand. Dr. Weeks aims to decolonize the sustainability movement through her work, which is not just about the environment, but about broader social change. Her research on industrial water pollution moves beyond technical explanations and solutions, instead conceptualizing local socio-environmental processes as embedded within and operating according to broader relations of political-economic power yet within the ecological limits to infinite economic growth. She takes on case studies of water pollution and pollution exposure risk in rural regions in the advanced stages of industrialization, providing evidence for the need for post-development approaches to sustainability management.

Her most recent research centered on the water-energy-food nexus of Kern County, California, which provided evidence that industrial agriculture and fossil fuel development in California’s San Joaquin Valley are producing green crime. While this research identified several chemicals related to these nexus industries that need to be prioritized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG-6 (clean water and sanitation), it also critiqued the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit as a neoliberal articulation of sustainable development.   

Dr. Weeks sees teaching as a form of social justice and an important space to initiate social change. She has taught physical geography at two California state prisons, climate justice, and inclusive innovation for managing the grand challenges of the Anthropocene. She is a proponent of adaptive cooperative management, considering that socio-environmental resilience and managing crises of global change requires the inclusion of local and Indigenous knowledge and connections between local communities, science, and policy.