of their causes-to-effects rather than effects-to-causes research methodology (see below). The methodological approach favored by Vayda and his frequent collaborator, Bradley Walters, draws on pragmatic features of the work of such philosophers as David Lewis on causal explanation and Charles S. Peirce on abductive reasoning. The approach has the following key features (or “admonitions” as the geographer/political ecologist Paul Robbins has called some of them): Events, including human actions, are made the usual objects of explanation. Among examples from Vayda's work are the events comprising deforestation, intergroup fighting, migration, forest fires, and adoption or non-adoption of integrated pest management. Explanation and explanation-oriented research proceed from the events that are regarded as the effects to be explained (i.e., the explananda) to their causes and not vice versa, thus reducing the confirmation bias which, according to Vayda and Walters, is promoted by the causes-to-effects research characteristic of such fields as political ecology. Multiple and/or alternative causal possibilities are investigated, with some usually being eliminated while others, comprising some portion of the causal histories of the explanandum events, are left to stand as likely or possible explanations. The main goal of research and explanation is seen as simply answering why-questions about concrete changes or events of interest and not as the kind of development or evaluation of general theories or models favored by some scholars, although theories or models are sometimes used as sources of the causal possibilities considered. In recent years Vayda has been using this methodological approach in explanation-oriented research on forest and peat fires in Indonesia and has, obversely, used the research in expositions of the methodology. Publications Vayda has published some hundred articles and several books, including 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 B. Walters, published by AltaMira Press in 2011. 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. Most recently, Vayda co-authored an article on Indonesia's peatland fires, which appeared in the January 2022 issue of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. Books by Vayda Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes, Lanham, MD: