Topher McDougal
Special guest
Topher McDougal, PhD, teaches courses on economic development, environmental peace & justice, humanitarianism, black markets, research methodologies, and evaluation.
Dr. McDougal’s research focuses on the microeconomic causes and consequences of armed violence and disasters, illicit trades (especially in small arms), and environmental peacebuilding. His first book, _The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict: Predation, Production, and Peripheries _(Oxford, 2017), explained how trade networks shape the nature and extent of civil war violence. His new book project, Gaia Wakes: Earth’s Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation (currently under review), makes the case that humanity is now challenged to create a centralized brain for the planet. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed outlets including Economic Geography, Political Geography, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Defence and Peace Economics, International Social Science Journal, Economics of Peace & Security, Stability, and others. He has also contributed to popular outlets including The Conversation, the Los Angeles Times, Marketplace Morning Report, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and Americas Quarterly.
In addition to consulting for various organizations including the World Bank, Mercy Corps, and the International Rescue Committee, Dr. McDougal has been a research affiliate at the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Graduate Institute for International & Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland), a principal of the Small Arms Data Observatory (SADO), and an invited scholar-in-residence at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Tecnológico de Monterrey. He was a recipient of MIT’s Presidential Doctoral Fellowship.
Topher McDougal has been a guest on 1 episode.
-
Episode 302: Is the Earth Growing a Brain?...with Topher McDougal
September 9th, 2025 | 53 mins 21 secs
On this episode of Give and Take, I talk with Topher McDougal, author of Gaia Wakes: Earth's Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation. In the book, McDougal explores the provocative idea that the planet itself might be waking up—that Earth, long treated as a backdrop to human drama, is revealing itself as a conscious, responsive system in the midst of ecological crisis. We talk about what it means to think of the Earth as a living, even sentient, entity; how this vision challenges modern science and philosophy; and why embracing a more relational way of seeing our world could be key to surviving the environmental devastation we face. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about philosophy, ecology, and the deep stories we tell about our place in the cosmos.