Ella Jae Fisher, PhD, is the founder and principal of Energy Ecologies, an Amsterdam-based advisory practice that provides embedded implementation support to organizations navigating sustainability transitions. The practice is one person, and a small number of people she trusts to do things well, called in when the work needs them. Everything else is on her. The practice operates under a method she calls the Petrichor Protocol (petrichor is the smell of rain on dry ground, and every ground makes its own), developed over twenty years of fieldwork and peer-reviewed research, for capturing the operational intelligence that emerges when new strategy meets existing organizational reality, and translating it into policy that holds.

Ella’s work centers the relationship between strategy and operational practice. As Principal Investigator of a six-year National Science Foundation research grant, she led Proyecto Buen Vivir, a collaborative ethnographic project in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua — a team of six including a co-investigator, two Nicaraguan field researchers, a postdoctoral researcher, and an undergraduate assistant, working with a cohort of forty residents — that developed workshop methods for bringing public-health officials, informal-sector workers, social workers, and educators into productive dialogue around shared operational problems. The methodology she developed there has since been adopted by worker cooperatives in Central America.

She has also served as Technical Director of the Organization Workshop (Laboratório Organizacional de Terreno), an internationally recognized employment-generation methodology originated by Clodomir Santos de Morais — friend and former cellmate of Paulo Freire — and supported by the International Labour Organization. The word terreno (terrain) is one of the concepts her practice is now built on.

Her career has spanned tenured academic appointments, fifteen years of board service with the Center for Development in Central America — the organization whose forty-six-year institutional record is the documentary basis of The Better Part — as well as current board service with Migrants of the Mediterranean, where her work is strategy and direct client relations with refugees, and applied advisory work with B Corps and mission-driven enterprises. After sixteen years as a professor, the last ten at Western Washington University — where she was promoted to Full Professor in 2021 — she moved to Amsterdam in 2025, both as a professional transition into commercial advisory practice and a personal one. That career also amounts to a great deal of teaching: more than 120 courses, and six cohorts of incoming faculty, about 120 people, through an active-learning workshop she co-facilitated. She is an expert in healthy and sustainable transitions — geographic, professional, and personal — though she would note that they are almost always communal.

Ella holds a PhD and MS in Anthropology from the University of Oregon and a BA in Physics and Anthropology from Bucknell University. She holds GRI Professional and ESRS Professional certifications (GRI Academy, 2026), was a visiting scholar in the Urban Ecologies Project (European Research Council–funded) at the University of Cambridge, served as co-editor of Anthropology of Work Review, and co-founded its open-access companion publication Exertions. She is a core member of the Community Economies Institute. Her book The Better Part: The Rise and Unraveling of the World’s First Fair Trade Clothing Network is under review at the University of Minnesota Press, in its Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series. A second book, Both Ends of the Needle, written with Alex Nading, is in active drafting. Her earlier academic publications appear under her prior name.

Exertions is built on open peer review, on the principle that review should help a text come to fruition rather than demonstrate how it fails. As guest editor of one forum she handled more than twenty submissions, commented on more than fifty drafts across six months, returned edits inside two weeks, and issued no outright rejections.