After receiving his PhD, Loring was a research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for three years. From 2013-2018, he was an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability, where among other responsibilities he served as the 2017 President of the Arctic Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[7] From 2018-2023 he held the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy and Society, a research chair funded by the Arrell Family Foundation at University of Guelph.
In his current role as a Global Director on The Nature Conservancy's Global Science Team, he "ensures that TNC’s science and practice incorporates attention to social and cultural dimensions of environmental problems and elevates local voices in the development and implementation of solutions."[1]
Loring's research in the Arctic explored Indigenous food security, fisheries, and the impacts of climate change. Loring has also done research on conflict over natural resources in settings such as Alaska[8][9] and the Canadian prairies.[10] As a part of this research, he co-produced and co-directed of the short documentary Wetland / Wasteland, which won an honorable mention at the 2020 Let’s Talk About Water film festival.[11]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Loring pivoted his research to explore how COVID-19 affected fisheries and farmers in the United States, Canada and Africa.[12][13][14][15]
In 2020, he published Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology. The book explores regenerative, sustainable and socially just food systems through various case studies, including cattle ranching in The Burren, Ireland, and Indigenous clam gardening in British Columbia.[16] It received a Silver medal in the Ecology & Environment category of the Nautilus Book Awards[17] and a Gold Medal in the Regional Non-fiction category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards.[18]
Podcasting
In May 2020, he launched the Social FISHtancing podcast with Hannah Harrison and Emily De Sousa,[19] which was nominated for a Canadian Podcast Award and a science communication award from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.[20] Loring and Harrison also coined the term "pubcast" to refer to audio recordings of published research articles.[21]
"Community-Led Initiatives as Innovative Responses" in Food Security in the High North. Routledge. 2022.
"Indigenous food sovereignty and tourism: the Chakra Route in the Amazon region of Ecuador" in Justice and Tourism Principles and Approaches for Local-Global Sustainability and Well-Being. Routledge. 2021.
"Fish as food: policies affecting food sovereignty for rural Indigenous communities in North America" The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Rural Policy. Routledge. 2019.
“Regenerative Food Systems and the Conservation of Change.” Agriculture and Human Values. 2021.
With Henry P. Huntington, Jennifer I. Schmidt, Erin Whitney, Srijan Aggarwal, Amanda G. Byrd, Subhabrata Dev, Aaron D. Dotson, Daisy Huang, and Barbara Johnson. "Applying the Food–Energy–Water Nexus Concept at the Local Scale." Nature Sustainability. 2021.
Gerlach, David E. Atkinson, and Maribeth S. Murray. "Ways to Help and Ways to Hinder: Governance for Successful Livelihoods in a Changing Climate." Arctic. 2011.
With M. Aaron MacNeil, Nicholas A. J. Graham, Joshua E. Cinner, Nicholas K. Dulvy, Simon Jennings, Nicholas V. C. Polunin, Aaron T. Fisk, and Tim R. McClanahan. "Transitional States in Marine Fisheries: Adapting to Predicted Global Change." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2010.
With Gerlach. "Food, Culture, and Human Health in Alaska: An Integrative Health Approach to Food Security." Environmental Science and Policy. 2009.
