About

My own baselines – of bearable environmental change and “normalcy” – have necessarily shifted throughout my lifetime.  Shifting baselines emerge from the contemplation of natural and cultural histories and attempts to conceive of ecosystems as stable despite the inevitability of major perturbations and “new normals” to which life must adapt or perish. Yet our desire for a stable, understandable, predictable world is as much a feature of our human psychology as the desire for a return to a golden past that may never have existed.

I strive to center my natural history writing and work as an environmental and science educator in experiences and connections to place and to bring together the ecological knowledge and timeless wisdom of the diverse Indigenous cultures in Alaska with the ecological knowledge derived from the methods of Western science. Since 2009, my focus has been on the nature of both ecological and psychological resilience in times of rapid climate change.

My book Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, published in 2018, was a deep dive into 8,000 years of the entangled natural and cultural history of the place that is my home. I was deeply honored to receive the 2020 Burroughs Medal for the book as outstanding natural history writing. My essays have been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review and We Alaskans and two received Honorable Mention in the Nonfiction category of the UAA/Anchorage Daily News Creative Writing  Contest (now also hosted by the Alaska Center for the Book).

I was born in Montana, went to college in California, came to Alaska as a graduate student in wildlife management and have spent most of the rest of my life here as a wildlife and habitat biologist, naturalist, environmental educator, and science communication specialist. In 2015, I graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Arts.

See my Bio page if you’d like more details about my publications, presentations, and courses I’ve taught in creative writing and in science and environmental education and communication.

Blog: Shifting Alaska Baselines