About

About me:

I’m an environmental scholar-professional based in Jackson, WY with interests in the politics of nature, political ecology, critical geography, and history. I like to wander across disciplines, yet two themes of inquiry remain: (a) how the past shapes the present and the way we tell stories of both to form the world we inhabit; and (b) how people make meaning out of values through institutions by using and affecting the environment.

I focus on the social and policy processes of conservation in the inter-mountain west and better understanding how forces of globalization, suburbanization, and nativism impact these arid landscapes. I’m interested in how these lands once considered terra nullis fit within the larger history of humanity and the sociological context they occupy today. Recent projects include geopolitical boundary issues, the efficacy of science-policy nonprofits in bringing about the change they want to see, and moral identities in the “golden age of recreation.” I want my work to contribute to building a better politics in how we govern and manage landscapes.

I’m currently the Executive Director of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, a collective of researchers who work in various environmental-related roles across the Greater Yellowstone region and elsewhere – all with the common goal of integrating reliable knowledge into policy decisions. I serve as the node to this web.

I’ve been lucky to have a series of wonderful mentors and friends so far, including David Moore, Natalie Dawson, and Richard Clow at the University of Montana; and Susan Clark, Justin Farrell, Mary Evelyn Tucker at Yale. The first chapter of this journey was in Missoula where I studied ecology and spent a year in a hybrid human-nature program through the school’s Wilderness Institute. I later received a master’s degree with an emphasis on people & equity combined with conservation from the Yale School of the Environment. While there, I was a Land Use Dialogue Fellow at The Tropical Resources Institute and a Wyss Scholar. I formed interests in critical inquiry, environmental history, and storytelling, and read the works of Arendt, Dewey, Lasswell, Latour, Tsing, and many others. 

I also enjoy listening to music, reading, making pottery and art, bike touring, and passing time with friends. 

My research interests:

My personal research interests focus on how boundaries on landscapes (phenomena) shape our social and political lives: the ways of knowing and identities (discourse) that set the parameters to solve environmental challenges. This framing comes from Urgency in the Anthropocene, when Dr. Amanda Lynch writes, “Our environmental crisis is a coupled problem of phenomena anddiscourse.” Many study how geopolitical boundaries restrict our ability to steward wildlife migrations, watersheds, wildfire, land use and climate change– as well as how boundaries shape claims for sovereignty and the age-old question in the America west, who gets to belong. I study how physical borders consolidate the perspectives and identities that determine the decision process in policy making.

I bring insights of political ecology and the policy sciences – and a sensibility from the humanities to better understand how environmental conflicts are rooted in the stories we tell ourselves. At a time in history when so many are reconsidering their relationship to earth, it’s never been more important to re-imagine our ways of making meaning to enlarge the sphere of dignity by becoming more open, letting go of allegiances to a single ideology, and demanding that those in power build on the common good and history that we have inherited.

From my perspective, many of the fundamental questions facing us today lie within the ‘environmental’ field, and that is partly why my own values of curiosity and creativity were drawn to this field. Having been a student, teacher, and practitioner in the field, I think it’s essential to continue to pass legislation, adapt technologies, study empirically, repatriate land, and more – and I work to support many of these initiatives. In addition, I intend to contribute to the ongoing refinement of Enlightenment-era philosophy and epistemology, in other words, improving our concepts and ways of thinking to deal with the emerging complexity in our world. Below is the primary framework I use in my work to organize the patterns I observe: