Grace A. Wang (born c. 1969) is an American sustainability scholar and professor at Western Washington University. At the university, she is a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy and director of the Sustainability Engagement Institute. Wang is best known for her publications on public lands and natural resource management, and for her advocacy of sustainability in higher education curricula and operations.
Early life and education Grace Wang was born in circa 1969, and is of Taiwanese descent. She grew up in the Seattle area of Washington state, and was drawn to natural resource conservation through her time spent camping and fishing with family. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, from which she received a B.S. degree in the political economy of natural resources. She then attended the University of Minnesota, where she attained M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in forestry. Her graduate research at the University of Minnesota, advised by Dorothy H. Anderson, focused on cultural resource and heritage management within the U.S. Forest Service and their links to ecosystems, culminating in a case study at Mount Hood in Oregon. This work was presented at the International Association for Society and Natural Resources conference and in the society's journal.
Career After receiving her doctorate, Wang worked at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, as an assistant professor of natural resources policy. She left Penn State in 2002 to accept a position at Western Washington University (Western) in Bellingham, Washington. Wang joined Western as an assistant professor, and became an associate professor for the 2006–2007 academic year. She has been a full professor since 2018–2019. A sustainability studies minor was established for the 2015–2016 academic year, and Wang was made the academic program director for sustainability. Since joining Western, she has taken on multiple roles within the College of the Environment, notably including service as chair of the Department of Environmental Studies (academic years 2018–2019 through 2020–2021) and Department of Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy (academic year 2021–2022). Wang was chair of the environmental studies department during its split into environmental studies and urban and environmental planning and policy; she joined the latter department. Western's Facing the Future program publishes sustainability curricula for educators. In 2018, Wang authored the second edition of their middle school course resource, Global Sustainability Issues: Population, Poverty, Consumption, and the Environment. This second edition includes a greater emphasis on global climate change and strategies for countering overconsumption. Also in 2018, the then-president of Western, Sabah Randhawa, honored Wang and others who wrote the university's Sustainability Action Plan with the Team Recognition Award. The Front, a student newspaper at Western, reported in June 2021 that action towards the 2017 Sustainability Action Plan was stalling, largely due to lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and participation in the plan being only voluntary. Wang was a member of the Sustainability Advisory Committee, which wrote the plan. At the time, sustainability at Western was overseen by the Office of Sustainability. The Office of Sustainability became the Sustainability Engagement Institute after a change in status in 2021. Since its establishment, Wang has served as the institute's director. The institute has been designated by AASHE as a Center for Sustainability Across the Curriculum, in recognition of its "experience organizing sustainability-oriented professional development for [its] own faculty". Within the scope of sustainability at Western, Wang also served as the chair of the President's Sustainability Council from its founding in 2022 until 2024. She is additionally the director of Curriculum for the Bioregion, an initiative at Western aimed at building sustainability into college courses; it includes a curriculum collection hosted by the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College. Outside of her institution, Wang is an editorial board member for the journal Sustainability and Climate Change, a board of directors member of the Northwest Natural Resource Group, and sits on the Bellingham Public Schools Sustainability Task Force. Wang was also formerly a member of the board of governors of the Sehome Hill Arboretum, which is jointly managed by the City of Bellingham and Western Washington University.
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