Interview with Mike Tiboris, UW-Madison Alumnus

by James Messina

Mike Tiboris grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and got his BA in philosophy from UW-Madison in 2003. He went on to get his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. After a period of time teaching for San Diego State University and helping to build its Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, Tiboris became a resident fellow at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, focusing on issues around water. Life’s currents then brought him back to Madison, where he works as a director of agriculture and water policy at the River Alliance of Wisconsin. In addition, he is a non-resident Global Water Fellow for the Chicago

Council on Global Affairs’ Food and Agriculture Program, and regularly teaches graduate courses on water governance at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson School for Environmental Studies and the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. I recently got the chance to talk with Mike about his experience as an undergraduate philosophy major at UW-Madison; his path after getting a PhD; and the ways in which his background in philosophy have allowed him to pursue jobs that make a positive impact on the world. 

James: How did you get into philosophy? 

Mike: I took a philosophy 101 class from a visiting professor and I thought, I have to do more of this. The thing that really clinched it was Terry Penner — he was a fantastic teacher. I was kind of interested in ancient philosophy but he made it so compelling…. He did these tutorials, and he put so much care into them. 

James: Any other philosophy teachers that left a particularly lasting impact on you?

Mike: I did a class with Larry Shapiro that was really good. I remember we did a lot of stuff on self-organizing systems…. I will sometimes see flocks of birds and think, self-organizing systems, Larry Shapiro! 

James: Can you tell me a little about what you are doing for work these days? 

Mike: Among other things, I’m the agriculture and water policy director at River Alliance of Wisconsin, which is a non-profit that does water advocacy. I do three things for them. I do a little policy work, which is kind of applied philosophy in a way. I look at the outcomes we are trying to achieve and work backwards to legislation and the campaigns needed to make that happen. I do a little lobbying but not much. The third thing is that River Alliance is the over-organization for all the smaller watershed organizations in the state…. River Alliance does a lot of capacity-building and support for these water groups around Wisconsin. We help them build orgs and become non-profits, and we help keep them from collapsing. It’s kind of behind the scenes work but I really enjoy it. 

James: You mentioned policy work is like applied philosophy. Can you expand on some of the ways in which your philosophy background enters into your job?

Mike: I work in agriculture. I talk to a lot of people, farmers in particular, who are hesitant to listen, sometimes hostile. Being able to navigate that on my feet is pretty important. [Because of philosophy] I have a perspective on what is motivating people’s reasoning that helps me tremendously. 

James: Can you give an example? 

Mike: There’s a kind of antecedent reticence on the farm population’s side to do anything that smacks of advocacy or policy. They don’t like talking about this. If you came into the room and said “we’re gonna help you be advocates for such and such a program” they would say “that’s politics, not interested.” But I’ve had several successful experiences getting them to see that in doing the work they are doing they have a stance on it that changes the calculus for how the legislature and DNR thinks about this stuff, and it’s important for the farmers to articulate their stance in a clear way. The funding cycle depends on people making a clear case for a program. Helping people become good defenders of what matters for them — this is one way in which philosophy comes in handy. 

James: Any other ways that philosophy enters into your current work?

Mike: I still do research work, consulting for various projects. I am doing one now with Purdue University. They are working on a large USDA grant to do research on how or why farmers in the corn belt states do or don’t transition to more diverse forms of agriculture. It’s important because that area is a huge driver of nutrient loss, soil loss, carbon emissions. Farmers are reticent to do anything different than they do. Probably it’s impossible for us to meet our carbon goals unless they do something different. The folks at Purdue are studying whether farmers care about that stuff and if they do, how they think about it, what would be convincing for them, how we could set things up to encourage them to transition, etc…. They’ll get farmers together to sort preferences and then they pull data from that. I will participate in the data collection. I got brought in as someone with an ethics background. I want to write about the normative elements of that decision making. You have a lot of people expressing a strong desire for a way of life that is incompatible with the way they run their businesses. I’m interested in that incompatibility, these cognitive inconsistencies. I think the particular kinds of irrationality matter. Some are confront-able, some aren’t. This is something that a philosopher can shed light on. 

James: Can you tell me how you transitioned from a more traditional academic career to more public policy work? 

Mike: I managed to land a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the ACLS. It’s called a public fellowship and it funded me for two years to join a public sector organization….Basically they arranged for an interview at the Council on Global Affairs, which is a think tank, and I got the position; I got to be a resident fellow there in Chicago. They do mostly international, foreign affairs stuff. They had a big institute for agriculture and hunger. What allowed me to get my foot in the door is that, at the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at SDSU, I was teaching all the courses that dealt with public policy—environmental ethics with a policy focus, things like that. I started teaching a class on water politics. So when I applied to the public fellowship I expressed an interest in working on international water politics  issues. I think that’s a major reason they took me on. They had a lot of people doing food work but I came in as a water specialist. What a cool experience that was! The way that place worked, the way a lot of think tanks work, is they pull people who are leaving academia or politics and house them to do research projects on areas of public interest…I got to write so much. Most of it was for a public policy audience. There was a lot of stuff written for the international affairs community. I would occasionally go to D.C. and give talks at the Wilson center….Then my life took a weird turn. We had to decide whether to move to D.C. and go further into that world, maybe going into government…. Family reasons brought me back to Madison and to the River Alliance. 

James: What’s so important about water politics? 

Mike: Water is the foundation of the food system. And you need it, on a daily basis, continuously, and it needs to be of a particular quality.  A tremendous amount of effort goes into providing that to you. Most of it is not visible to us. Here in the wealthy world we don’t see water treatment, we don’t see the thicket of regulatory stuff that makes it so your water is not toxic. At the international level, there’s a shocking number of people who don’t have basic water access. It hovers around 900 million people, many more if you count people for whom access requires walking considerable distances…. A huge number of children under 5 die from waterborne diseases. These are solvable problems, we have the money to do it, we clearly have an interest in doing it, we know what to do. The major obstacle is political. It’s 100% a policy question. That scales from the international level all the way down to here in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has a tremendous problem with nutrients in the groundwater. 40-60% of nutrients used in farming go into the ground water. It’s toxic, it causes algae blooms, which are themselves toxic and also make the water hypoxic, killing fish. Nitrogen leached into groundwater gets converted by soil bacteria into nitrate, which makes it hard for the body to carry oxygen. It’s again a problem for small children….There are several communities in Wisconsin that have not been able to drink their water for years. We also have a bad PFAS problem. It’s a non-stick coating and fire retardant. We have a couple of companies in Wisconsin that produce this stuff. We’re finding it in the groundwater and there’s no easy way to remove it. These are policy problems.