Michael Mayerfeld Bell is an associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mike is principally an environmental sociologist, but he also conducts research on culture, economic sociology, sustainable agriculture, community, place, rural society, inequality, gender, the body, democracy, and social theory. Two central themes can be heard in all of his work: dialogics and the sociology of "nature," broadly conceived. Mike is the author of Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (University of Chicago Press, 1994), which was co-winner of the 1995 Outsta