Dakota is a master’s student and Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Vermont’s Department of Community Development and Applied Economics; he begins his Ph.D. fall of 2023. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina, Asheville in environmental management and policy, with a minor in economics. Before grad school, Dakota worked as a researcher and project manager for a sustainability consulting firm in New York City. There, he consulted with designers, developers, city governments and NGOs on green building practices, community resilience planning, wellness-focused design and ecosystem-based performance metrics. Dakota is passionate about fostering vibrant, bioregional community networks that subjugate their economic system to people and planet. His academic interests include economic geography, complexity science, just rent distribution, ecological economics, and the interrelation between land-use, culture and place perceptions. Dakota’s current research explores land value taxation as a means of recommoning the value of place which is socially-derived but privately appropriated through land price appreciation.