Steve Lansing

J. Stephen Lansing is an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, and  emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. From 2015 to 2019 he was Founding Director of the Complexity Institute and Professor in the Asian School of Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research on Balinese water temples was the basis for Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 2012. His 1991 book  Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali was  the focus of an exhibition  by a team of architects, artists and researchers from ETH Zurich at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2019. His most recent book is Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press 2019). Presently he is working with the Leakey Foundation and the Nature Conservancy to assist hunter-gatherers in Borneo, and with Balinese colleagues to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies.