About

I am a professor at Simon Fraser University, teaching in the Departments of History and Geography, and an affiliate researcher at Stanford University's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. My award-winning scholarship includes environmental histories of fisheries, science, recreation, gentrification, and the North American West. I am currently writing about conservation, federal lands, and Congress.

Featured Work

Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast

2019

An environmental history of the Nestucca River basin that examines the interplay of work, ecology, and identity from precontact times to the present. The book challenges modern notions that work and play were antithetical approaches to community building in the rural West, at least until the 1980s, and it explains why older forms of environmental relations unraveled in such spectacularly destructive ways.

Other Works

  • Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship

    2016

  • Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands

    2012

  • Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk

    2010

  • Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West

    2003

  • Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies

    2002

  • Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis

    1999

  • Power and Place in the North American West

    1999

Awards and Recognition

  • 2021 finalist, Frances Fuller Victor Award, Oregon Book Awards for Persistent Callings 2018-2019 Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellowship, National Humanities Center 2010 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography for Pilgrims of the Vertical. 2004 Honorable Mention, Joel Palmer Award, Oregon Historical Society 2002-2003 MacArthur Ecological Humanities Fellow, National Humanities Center 2000 Library Journal Ten Best Books in Technology and Science for Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis 2000 Theodore C. Blegen Award: Forest History Society’s award for best article in forest and conservation history in 1999 for “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon” 2000 George Perkins Marsh Prize: American Society for Environmental History’s prize for best book prize in 1999 for Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis 1999 Oscar O Winther Prize: Western History Association, best article in the Western Historical Quarterly