About

HELLO AND WELCOME!

YOU HAVE REACHED the website for Peter Alagona, professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. On this site, you will find links to my research, writing, and some of the programs and organizations in which I participate. If you have any questions, would like to learn more about the topics covered here, or are interested in graduate study at UC Santa Barbara, please feel free to contact me.

I’M AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIAN, historian of science, conservation scientist, and nature-culture geographer. My work explores what happens when humans share space and resources (their habitats) with other species: how we interact with non-human creatures, how we make sense of these interactions, why we fight so much about them, what we can learn from them, and how we might use these lessons to foster a more just, peaceful, humane, and sustainable society. Most of my research has focused on human interactions with wildlife in North America. A second area of interest involves developing creative interdisciplinary, collaborative, and mixed methods for studying ecological change over multiple time periods and scales.

DURING THE FIRST PHASE OF MY CAREER, in the 2000s, I focused on the history, science, law, and politics of endangered species conservation. After completing my first book in 2013, I shifted to focusing on human interactions with more common species, as well as the challenges of living with large carnivores, and reintroducing lost species.

IN EARLY 2022, the University of California Press will publish my next book, The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities. For more on this project, click on the link in the menu above. For the past 5 years, I have served as the founder and facilitator of the California Grizzly Research Network, which is conducting a series of research and outreach projects designed to promote a more informed scholarly and public conversation about the past and potential future of grizzly bears in California. Over the past many years, I have been involved in several other interdisciplinary environmental research groups, including the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on Marine Environmental History, Environmental History Graduate Workshop, UC Natural Reserve System History & Archive Project, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer School on City/Nature, the Convivial Conservation (CONVIVA) Network, a National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) working group on Historical Ecology, the Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI), the Paleoecology in Novel Ecosystems group based at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, and more.

I TEACH SEVERAL CLASSES at UCSB, including the Introduction to Environmental Studies course (ES 1), a course on human-wildlife interactions called Wildlife in America (108W), and seminars on topics from Storytelling and the Environment to Lions, Tigers, and Bears: Coexisting with Large Carnivores in the 21st Century. I am currently serving as the director of the Interdepartmental PhD Emphasis in Environment & Society.

IN ADDITION TO MY RESEARCH AND TEACHING, I am active in public service and other professional activities. I have served on the faculty editorial committee of the University of California Press, I am an associate editor of the MIT Press book series History for a Sustainable Future, I am the Secretary of the American Society for Environmental History, I serve on several committees for the University of California’s Natural Reserve System, and I am the Faculty Advisor for the wonderful Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserves. I serve on several other boards and steering committees, I give frequent public lectures, and I do occasional interviews with newspapers, public radio stations, and other media outlets.

THROUGHOUT MY CAREER, I have been fortunate to work with wonderful mentors, colleagues, and students at institutions that value interdisciplinary and humanistic environmental scholarship. The first stage of this journey ended when I completed my undergraduate degree in history at Northwestern University in 1995. I later received a master's degree in geography from UC Santa Barbara, and master's and doctoral degrees in history from UCLA. Before joining the UCSB faculty in 2008, I was a Beagle Environmental Fellow in the Center for the Environment and Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor in the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.

WHEN I'M NOT WORKING, I spend my time outdoors with family and friends. In 2015 I took up running and I'm now training for my third marathon. My greatest passion, though, is mountaineering. Over the past two decades, I have climbed peaks in Mexico, Indonesia, Europe, Alaska, and throughout the American West. During graduate school, I lived for a summer in Washington's North Cascades, and in Santa Barbara I am fortunate to have the Los Padres National Forest in my backyard. I have a special fondness, though, for California’s High Sierra, where I’ve climbed dozens of peaks, camped by hundreds of alpine lakes, hiked thousands of miles of trails, and been bitten by what seems like millions of mosquitoes. I also love to surf, raft rivers, or just go for walks with my dog on the beaches near my home.