Andrew P. Vayda is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ecology at Rutgers University and Senior Research Associate of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. Formerly a professor at Columbia University, he has taught also at the University of Indonesia and other Indonesian universities and at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in methodology and explanation at the interface between social and ecological science and has directed and participated in numerous research projects on people’s interactions with forests in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Currently he is taking part in a CIFOR research project on anthropogenic carbon emissions from Indonesian peatlands. He has published some hundred articles and several books, including, most recently, Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes, a selection of his essays on explanation and explanation-oriented research in the social sciences and human ecology, published by AltaMira Press in 2009, and Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader, co-edited by him and Bradley Walters, published by AltaMira Press in 2011. The journal, Human Ecology, was founded by him, and he was its editor for five years. He serves at present on the editorial boards of Anthropological Theory, Borneo Research Council Publications, Forests, and Human Ecology. A festschrift in his honor, Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, with a concluding chapter by him on “Causal Explanation as a Research Goal,” was published in 2008 by AltaMira Press.