Dr. Michael Gunter's Homepage

Dr. Mike Gunter teaches courses in international relations and environmental politics. During June and July 2009 he served as an expert commentator for Studienforum Berlin and their workshop on climate change and Germany’s environmental strategy. In May and June 2009, along with ten colleagues, he participated in Rollins' China for Professors field study, part of a series of nationally recognized internationalization efforts on the Rollins campus.

Gunter is the author of Building the Next Ark: How NGOs Work to Protect Biodiversity (2006 paperback & 2004 cloth) with Dartmouth College and University Press of New England. A 2006 Sprout Award nominee, the work has been favorably reviewed by popular and trade periodicals such as Environment, the North American Association of Environmental Educator's Communicator, and the United Nations Environmental Program’s magazine, Our Planet, as well as academic journals such as Global Environmental Politics, International Studies Review, Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, and the non-profit journal Voluntas.

Named a Cornell Distinguished Faculty member at Rollins, Gunter has also written a number of articles, editorials, and reviews for publications such as Biological Conservation, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Encyclopedia of the Developing World, Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change, Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, The Journal of Politics, Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Organization & Environment, Politics and the Life Sciences, Teaching Theory and Academic Writing, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

In 2007 Gunter served as a distinguished Fulbright Scholar for the U.S. State Department targeting civil society and sustainable development in the Slovak Republic at Univerzita Komenského Fakulta Sociálnych a Ekonomických Vied. During that time Gunter spoke at the Gustav-Stresemann Institut in Bonn, Germany, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy. Here he addressed the politics of climate change in U.S. foreign policy as well as the links between terrorism and unsustainable development for their annual Fachleiter Conference. Additional grants targeted Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon, Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in South Africa, and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, among others.

Gunter spoke, along with former Vice President Al Gore and noted environmental writer Rick Bass, at the prestigious Stonecipher Symposium on Technology, Communication, and Culture in March 2002. He was on the 2006 Screening Committee for the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and serves as a continuing manuscript reviewer for Choice, Global Environmental Politics, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and Wadsworth presses. On the Rollins College campus, Gunter serves as director of the International Relations Program as well as the advisor for the Rollins Washington Semester Program and Model UN student organization. He also served as Rollins first faculty-in-residence and director of Living & Learning Communities at Rollins, a series of programs which focused on linking academic and social aspects on campus.

Before returning to academia, Dr. Gunter worked for several years in Washington, D.C., first as a legislative correspondent in the U.S. House of Representatives and later as an editor for a public policy newswire service in the National Press Building. A curriculum vitae is available here. Links to current and past courses are found below: