My passion for sustainability and environmental justice has been shaped by a lifetime of diverse experiences. Raised in a single-parent household by my mother, a 20-year U.S. Army veteran, I moved frequently before age 18, living in O‘ahu, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Daegu, and El Paso—each place deepening my understanding of cultural and ecological systems.

On O‘ahu, I was raised in the spirit of Aloha and connection to the land, while in Los Angeles, my family’s Mexican-Indigenous practices of herbal medicine taught me to value diverse knowledge systems. Experiences in the Pacific Northwest, D.C., South Korea, and El Paso exposed me to watershed dynamics, urban water issues, agricultural communities, and binational environmental challenges.

I earned my B.S. in Marine Science–Biology with a minor in Environmental Science at the University of Tampa, where I participated in niche ecology research with mangrove trees and algae populations. This fostered a new mindset of how the smallest of organisms in the food chain make the biggest differences.

After 18 months of volunteer service in the U.S. South and Canada—where I learned French, taught English, and supported community programs—I discovered my passion for teaching. Later, as an educator with KUPU in Hawai‘i, I taught environmental science and Hawaiian cultural practices to the low-income communities of West O’ahu. These experiences have shaped the trajectory of my career. I believe that investing in the education of future generations is one of the most powerful long-term strategies for addressing environmental challenges. My graduate project will focus on integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge into U.S. environmental education, empowering students to become sustainability-minded decision-makers.
Having just moved from O’ahu, some of my pastimes include lei making, dancing, singing, free-diving, traveling abroad, and watching baseball with my family! Winter pastimes I enjoy include snowboarding, ice skating, sledding, and stargazing at a campfire with Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate.

Originally from the unceded lands of the Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Ute peoples (Salt Lake City), I received a BA from Scripps College (think more liberal arts, less fish) in Media Studies and Environmental Analysis. Before returning to SLC, I had the opportunity to explore these fields outside of an academic context first as an intern at DC’s National Gallery of Art then as an environmental educator in Seattle. Throughout both roles, I grew increasingly focused not only on communicating environmental issues themselves, but also on prompting more in depth sustainable, connected thinking.

Through the EH program, I am looking to bridge these academic and on the ground experiences. Broadly interested in centering how media (technological and material) represent, communicate, and connect to deserts in the American Southwest and Utah, I am especially informed by Environmental Justice principles and an ethos of entanglement, care, and multiplicity. I am excited to think through questions of how physical and day-to-day interactions with place are mediated and the roles environmental communication can play.

Beyond class, I love exploring old/new media and technologies, ephemera, coffee shops, foresty deserty nature, digital art, music, video games, and comfy cozy places to read.

/photo: Jachelle Araiza

I was born and raised in the heart of New York City, but at the end of each school year, my family would pack up our minivan and drive to the Rockies, which both of my parents call home. The summer months I spent wandering through the Wasatch Front, the Teton Range, and the Flathead Valley cemented in me a deep awe for alpine landscapes. I earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Public Health at Williams College, where my central line of inquiry emerged around questions of psychopathology on both individual and systemic levels. During the summers, I worked as an outdoor educator in Adirondack State Park, and outside of class, I managed a campus-wide farm-to-table lunch series, where I found immense joy connecting with local farmers and chopping up pounds of seasonal produce with my peers.

Since graduating, I have followed intersecting lines of inquiry into human well-being, and ecological, political, and identity-based relationships to land: as a farm apprentice in the Hudson Valley, a Teaching Fellow at an outdoor boarding middle school in the heart of Adirondack Park, and, most recently, as a case manager at a refugee resettlement agency in New York City.

I begin my studies in the Environmental Humanities program pursuing similar questions of community health and identity as they relate to land and climate change. My research interests include displacement, the psychological effects of climate change, and the intersection of human health, community sovereignty, and environmental health.

I’m thrilled and moved to be out West, closer to my extended family and beginning to form my own roots in a place so formative to my childhood. I’m looking forward to continuing to romp around the mountains, to learn and grow beside my inspiring cohort, and to build up my sea-level lungs!

I grew up in Massachusetts where I spent my childhood between the woods of Maine and Boston’s urban sprawl. For my undergraduate degree, I attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. There, I studied Geography, with my degree culminating in a dissertation using GIS and remote sensing to research ‘vulnerability’ due to mining in Appalachia. At St. Andrews I found a home in a sustainability organization, running a food co-op and gardening with my friends. I left my degree passionate about neither physical geography nor human but the space in-between. Since graduating the University of St. Andrews, I have worked in conservation and outdoor education in the national forests of New Hampshire and then Montana. Most recently, I worked as a research fellow for the Forest Service investigating the history of timber product surveying.

Drawing on my work in extractivism in my undergraduate degree, I come to the environmental humanities program with questions on the relationship between systems, culture and epistemologies and our natural resource management. My research interests include decoloniality, Marxist ecologies, environmental sacrifice zones, rural studies and corn ethanol.

Outside the classroom, I aspire to become a quilter, a trail runner, and someone who can sit still. When not conversing with my friends, I love to dance, swim, explore and work on my tree identification.

I was raised in the Mississippi River Valley, on a small farm in the Driftless Area of southeastern Minnesota where my family tended flocks of sheep, alpaca, chickens, and bees. As a child, abundant creative energy manifested in the building of tree forts and rearrangement of creek beds. I went on to pursue a BFA in Fine Arts Studio at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. After graduating in 2018, I was awarded several grants, participated in solo and group exhibitions, and attended artist residency programs around the country. My creative practice engages in critical thinking about environmental topics through printmaking, textiles, writing, and community workshops.

During the last summer of my undergraduate degree, I started working at an urban vegetable farm and found myself immediately captivated by the endless subtleties of tending soil and growing food. Farming allowed me to work directly with plants, gain a better understanding of local food systems, and deepen my relationship to land. I have now worked more than seven seasons on organic vegetable and flower farms, tending a variety of annual and perennial crops on operations of different scales. I chose to step away from farming for the time being to pursue research interests in another part of the food system: hunting. I am particularly interested in examining the ways hunting can help build relationships between humans, landscapes, and the species we kill for food. This interest comes from a deep personal entanglement with food that stems back to a childhood foraging for mushrooms and hunting wild game with my father in Minnesota.

In my free time I enjoy trail running with my pup, foraging for wild food and medicine, sitting in cold creeks, cooking overly elaborate meals, and cross country skiing.

I grew up outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I completed my undergraduate degree in Education from the Pennsylvania State University. A common thread through my teaching and the projects that I created has been raising awareness of the human impacts on and relations with the environment. To further my interests, I began building connections within local nonprofit groups in Utah, which led me to an internship as a Grassroots Organizer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. As a Grassroots Organizer, I advocated within the community to build support for the preservation of land against extractive industries in Utah. These lands include the unceded ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, Dine, and Paiute peoples. It was through this experience that I began asking questions about land management issues throughout the West.

I am starting my journey in the Environmental Humanities program, with a curiosity and lens toward indigenous sovereignty, decolonialism, and indigenous ecologies as a form of resistance and environmental justice in the Anthropocene. Through the Mellon Foundation, I am grateful to have the opportunity to build connections and engage with community-based organizations that are working toward these values.
Outside of school, I enjoy reading, hiking and camping with my dog, and exploring the deep and winding canyons of the desert.

/photo: Jachelle Araiza

I grew up in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and the cloud forests of Costa Rica. My parents were rainforest biologists and I was steeped in biological science, ecospiritual quakerism, long hikes, rice and beans, and grunge music from a young age. I have always been awe-struck by wild nature and the persistence of life in the face of adversity. In high school I became interested in food justice, herbalism, and seed-sovereignty. I worked on small-scale farms in North and South America, studied Permaculture design, and received my BS in Urban Ecology at the University of Utah in 2016. I started The Mobile Moon Co-op, a femme and queer led botanical collective and was invited to the EH program as the first Community Practitioner in Residence in 2021. Four years later I have come to the EH program again as a student in order to advance my work and research on local food and seed networks.  

I currently work at The Salt Lake City Public Library as the garden and seed library coordinator and help run The Mobile Moon Co-op farm; a small queer community space in West Valley City. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, I intend to research and enhance networks of adaptive resilience in the region via Indigenous self-determination and community seed saving. By providing strong, viable seed to return to Ute, Shoshone, and Goshute tribal members as well as Salt Lake City’s vibrant gardening community, I aim to initiate a radically renewed lineage of collaborative survival.  

Hey there! My name is Matt and I’m passionate about wild places and what they can teach us about ourselves. After graduating with a degree in anthropology and economics, I spent five years teaching high school biology and working in the private sector. When I wasn’t at a desk pushing buttons, I was outside skiing, biking, running, and camping.

Eventually I realized that the recipe for a good life is quality time with people, in beautiful places, doing things that fulfill you mentally and physically. So, I finally made my ten-year-old self proud and traded my suit and tie for a sun shirt and sandals. After a few years as a backcountry guide with Holiday River Expeditions, I was itching to get back into the academic world, and the Environmental Humanities program presented to perfect opportunity to study what I love with a focus on staying engaged with the outdoor recreation community and working towards social change.

My research interests include the rights of nature movement, water in the west, and the interplay between outdoor recreation and preservation. In addition to my coursework, I teach undergraduate writing & rhetoric, make art on a blog called Pancake Morality, and play almost every day in the Wasatch mountains.