J. Stephen Lansing

He is especially known from his decades of research on the emergent properties of human-environmental interactions in Bali, Borneo and the Malay Archipelago;[1] social-ecological modeling,[2] and complex adaptive systems.

In 2017, Lansing and colleagues showed that the self-organization of the water temple networks is not an historical accident, but an emergent property of a self-governing system of environmental management.

In 2000, he began to work with Indonesian medical researchers, linguists and public health officials to study the co-evolution of social structure, language change and disease resistance on 17 islands in the Malay archipelago.

Combining fine-grained linguistic, genetic and kinship information revealed historical patterns of gene expression, social interaction and language change on a scale of time and space that had not previously been observed.

In May 2018 Lansing led a team that discovered a group of cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers in Indonesian Borneo, and a year later began working with the Leakey Foundation and the Nature Conservancy to help the Cave Punan preserve their forests.