About Me:

From 2006-21 I worked as a professor of environmental history and policy at Sonoma State University (SSU), in Northern California. I was honored to receive a Fulbright-NSF Arctic Scholars grant in 2020-21 to conduct historical search in the Westfjords of Iceland, hosted by the University Centre of the Westfjords in Ísafjörður. In June 2021 I took early retirement from SSU, established Aspara Consulting ehf. from which to continue doing historical and environmental research, teaching, and advising, and resettled on the shores of Dýrafjörður near Þingeyri. In addition to my professional life, I am an avid photographer, sailor, and most recently knitter.

My long-term research agenda is to continue to explore the history of protected landscapes to bolster their long-term sustainability in terms of both natural and cultural systems. With a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, I use landscape as a tool for understanding the complex interactions between people and their environments, tracking historical changes in protected areas as indicators of shifting social dynamics and structures. A firm grounding in property theory contributes to my interest in the interplay between public and private ownership in protecting rural landscapes. Much of my research work has been done at Point Reyes National Seashore, examining the impacts of National Park Service management on the local ranching landscape. New projects focus on the history of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, and landscape history of the Strandir region in Iceland’s Westfjords. Prior to my academic job at SSU, I worked as an environmental consultant in San Francisco for four years with EDAW, Inc., specializing in writing resource management plans for the Bureau of Land Management, as well as historic landscape analyses for a variety of government agencies.

Please find my published research on my ResearchGate profile, or on my Academia.edu profile.