My passion for sustainability and environmental justice has been shaped by a lifetime of diverse experiences across places, cultures, and ecological systems. Growing up on Oʻahu and moving between cities and countries from a young age nurtured an early understanding of relationality and reciprocity.

I am a graduate student in the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah, where my work explores Hawaiian culture-based learning initiatives and the role of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) within conservation and environmental education on West Oʻahu. My scholarship is grounded in the belief that language is not simply a tool for communicating environmental knowledge, but a living practice through which relationships to land, community, and cultural identity are sustained.

A central community partner in my work is Mālama Learning Center (MLC), an organization I have worked alongside for the past couple years. During the summer, I joined MLC in a season of mālama ʻāina, documenting their methodologies and pedagogies surrounding land restoration, cultural revitalization, and community outreach. This work became the foundation for my ethnographic documentary, *I Ka ʻŌlelo No Ke Ola*, roughly translated as “In language/words, there is life.” The title draws from a longer ʻōlelo noʻeau and reflects how MLC uses ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi to bring life into the places and spaces they steward across West Oʻahu, a region shaped by both ecological and socioeconomic challenges.

I offer this film as a gift to the West Oʻahu community and to the staff, interns, and partners who dedicate themselves to this work. Through film as a research methodology, I hope to honor the sacred practice of storytelling in Hawaiʻi while making scholarly thought and theory more accessible to broader communities. The film is scheduled to debut on the University of Utah campus in Spring 2027.

Outside of my academic work, I enjoy lei making, dancing, singing, free-diving, traveling, and spending time with family while watching baseball!

Originally from the unceded and contemporary homelands of the Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Ute peoples (so-called Salt Lake City), my relationships with place have been shaped by subalpine meadows, desert rivers, and the rhythms of snowstorms cycling to dry summer sun. From a BA in Media Studies and Environmental Analysis at Scripps College to an internship with DC’s National Gallery of Art to environmental education in Seattle, my interests have continually met at the confluence of communication and the environment. These experiences have centered an attention to the relationships between large-scale environmental issues and people day-to-day. I have continued to engage questions around communicating environmental issues as embodied, connected, and ever-present through my graduate assistantship with the Natural History Museum of Utah’s exhibits team.

The rains, oceans, and swamplands I learned with in my time away from the Salt Lake valley taught me the many ways communities are always in conversation with their home waters and have sharpened my curiosity about water in Utah’s more arid context. I thus look to study how water in Salt Lake City’s semi-arid context is represented and discussed in its material, day-to-day dimensions and how these discussions are caught up in structures of power and settler logics. I am especially informed by a critical and environmental justice ethos of entanglement, care, and multiplicity, and my work seeks to follow water as it flows toward more just, decolonial worldings.

Beyond class, you can find me in cozy coffee shops, nodding along to music, hiking through aspen groves, reading in desert sands, and sketching creek-side (and sometimes inside playing video games). 

/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, where 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 that complemented and contested my love for the lifeforce of the urban. 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 in public health systems and voiced through literature. During college, I worked as an outdoor educator in Adirondack State Park and 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. After graduating, I continued to follow 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, an English and Edible Schoolyard Teaching Fellow at an outdoor boarding middle school in the heart of Adirondack Park, and as a case manager at a refugee resettlement agency in New York City.

My tenure in the environmental humanities has enabled me to combine my interests in theories of the body and biopolitics, and theories of language and sense-making. As a graduate researcher at the University of Utah, I have applied this lens to phenomenological and material narration of experiences of embodied, environmental exposures and climate change impacts by people experiencing homelessness in the Salt Lake Valley; my scholarship rests on multi-part, in-depth interviews with lived experts that I have spent the fall conducting. This thesis work emerged from my position as a graduate research assistant for a collaboration with the Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness’s Lived Expert Task Group and the work of local non-profit Unsheltered Utah’s emergency “Code Blue” overnight shelters, a local example of community work at the nexus of climate change and homelessness. 

My time in Salt Lake has been a sweet return to the mountain-romping places of my childhood summers, full of growth and laughter alongside my cohort, biking (somehow always uphill) through Salt Lake City’s streets, and running and skiing through the Wasatch.

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 Montana. Most recently, I worked as a research fellow for the U.S. Forest Service investigating the history of timber product surveying.

What fascinates me is how nature, economy and our relations of power work through and within each other. I continue to be curious about issues that face rural America and how ‘resources’ are managed, extracted and stewarded there. In these questions, I have found myself emersed in political ecology literatures. This past year I have been researching corn ethanol and its place as a fuel in the renewable energy transition and the political economy of agriculture. Through this research, I became more interested in the ways capitalism wields tools that abstract, quantify and make land legible. 

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.

The focus of my graduate research is human-animal relationships in the context of western deer and elk hunting. I’m interested in the ways that hunters talk about the animals they kill, and how this discourse might reproduce, contest, or reimagine the dominant ideologies that structure relationships between humans and animals. Conducting research as an Environmental Humanities graduate student has given me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the sociohistoric processes that have shaped hunting in the diverse set of practices that it is today and to connect directly with hunters through qualitative interviewing to learn about their experiences, perspectives, and values.

I started hunting when I was twelve, spending countless hours sitting in tree stands and blinds with my dad in the woods behind my parents’ house. My experiences hunting over the past 15 years have cultivated a deep sense of connection with land and the animals I kill for food, while fostering a personal ethic of ecological and interspecies care. 

I was raised in the Mississippi River Valley, on a small farm in southeastern Minnesota where my family tended flocks of sheep, alpaca, chickens, and bees. 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 woodcut printmaking, writing, and community workshops. I’ve continued to pursue creative work during my graduate program, although this is not the focus of my studies. 

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

/photo: Brandon Scott Herrell

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 pursue these 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, Diné, and Paiute peoples. It was through this experience that I began asking questions about land management issues throughout the West. 

I started 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 work with community-based organizations that are working toward these values. I am working with C 4Ever Green, a Diné-led grassroots organization to address the lack of solid waste infrastructure on the portion of the Navajo Nation that borders Utah. This project has advocated both at the local community level with affected community members, and seeks to involve implementing agencies in advocating for infrastructure locally. My research is guided by the field of Environmental Justice and Indigenous Studies. I am thinking alongside Robert Bullard’s work in his book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality; Traci Brynne Voyles in Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country; and Colville Confederated Tribes scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker in As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. My thesis seeks to understand what the role of sederal, state, and Navajo Nation policy and law has in creating the lack of solid waste infrastructure throughout the communities of the Navajo Nation. This semester I am also a student in Professor Ruhan Nagra’s Environmental Justice Clinic, which has given me the opportunity to continue to develop the skills that are critical in working with communities to address issues of environmental justice. Outside of school, I enjoy riding my bike, hiking and camping with my dog, and exploring the deep and winding canyons of the desert. 

/photo: Jachelle Araiza

I have been rooted in Utah since 2013, but I grew up in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and the cloud forests of Costa Rica, where my parents studied and taught tropical biology. From a young age I experienced a nagging dissonance with the status quo and an equally persistent fascination with the more-than-human world. My rebellion against the isolation and divisiveness of consumer culture manifested as deep devotion to the regenerative intersections of land, food, and community health. I worked on rural and urban farms domestically and in South America, studied Environmental Humanities at Whitman College, pursued bike mechanics, Indigenous land advocacy, fermentation and herbalism in Salt Lake City. In 2016 I graduated from the University of Utah with my BS in Urban Ecology. In 2017 I started a mobile mutual aid apothecary in a converted school bus and in 2019 parked the bus on a vacant 1/2 acre lot which developed into a sympoietic community land project. In 2021 was invited to the EH program as the Community Practitioner in Residence to connect the Environmental Humanities students with subversive queer community, hands-on land restoration, and herbal medicine-making. 

Now, as a graduate researcher in the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Program, I have oriented my focus towards the establishment of a diverse, native, and adaptive seed network and archive for the public. For the past five years, I have managed and expanded the seed-lending and gardening programs at the Salt Lake City Public Library. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, I am working to create a living archive of locally adapted, open-pollinated, and culturally storied sovereign seeds available for free via the public library system. As weather patterns degenerate and industrial food systems decay, our seeds and the native ecosystems they pertain to hold critical wisdoms and possibilities for the future. I hope to better understand the adaptive capacities of seeds through decolonial histories, more-than-human ethnographies, and interconnected lineages of survival on land.

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.

I grew up as a white settler on the ancestral and unceded lands of the P’squosa people in central Washington, at the confluence of the Wenatchee and Columbia rivers. My childhood was filled with memories of romping around the mountains, frolicking in the rivers, and marveling at the thunderstorms that shook the valley every summer. My love for the environment can undoubtedly be attributed to my mother. She taught me about the history, ecology, and uniqueness of the little valley we grew up in and fostered a desire within me to tend relationships with the non-human world.
In 2021, I moved to the ancestral lands of the Coastal Salish peoples to attend the University of Washington and pursue a BS in Biology, with a focus in ecology, evolution and conservation. During my time there, I worked on a research project studying feeding patterns of nectivorous birds in southern Australia. Once graduating in 2024, I worked for a landscaping company, restoring wetlands and swamps through invasive species removal and planting projects in public and private areas owned by the King County Wastewater Department. One of our supervisors was very passionate about centering Indigenous knowledges in the way we worked, whether it was planting methods or using indigenous names.  This passion for understanding our environment from a different perspective guided me to graduate school, where I was able to find this program, which centers Indigenous knowledges and principles within studies of environmental issues. I’m very curious about Pacific Islander environmental justice issues, especially related to cultural impacts due to biodiversity loss. I’m also interested in exploring how to reframe broader conservation practices in a way that centers Indigenous knowledges of the ecology of the land and best stewardship practices.

Outside of class, you can find me playing with my dog, on a hiking trail, a climbing route, or in my hammock reading a book. I’m especially excited to begin working on some new plant identification!

I spent most of my life in the Pampas, the grasslands of southern Brazil, surrounded by many rivers, flat grasslands, low mountains, and cattle. As a first-generation college student, my path to education was never linear or clear. I began my undergraduate studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where I fell in love with learning. After mt first year, I received the Francis Perkins Scholarship to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts on a full scholarship. At Mount Holyoke, I majored in Environmental Studies with a Nexus (minor) in Development Studies. 

For my senior thesis research at Mt. Holyoke, I investigated how the U.S. and China approached energy investments in Brazil in the Cold War and Second Cold War, respectively. Both countries have played and continue to play important roles in energy development and planning in Brazil, especially now in the context of the energy transition. In the Environmental Humanities program, I seek to continue exploring China-US geopolitical tension and its manifestations in the Brazilian energy sector. I am especially drawn to how energy infrastructure can shape nature-human interactions, and how the construction of new infrastructure often leads to uneven distributions of burdens and benefits while establishing relations of power. As I continue my research, I seek to further explore and connect geography, political ecology, and development studies. 

I grew up in the suburbs south of Salt Lake City, on the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone peoples. It was there that I first learned to garden. I worked with my family to plant, tend, harvest, and weed the garden each year. I took a bit of a hiatus for several years after moving out, but the past two seasons I’ve had the opportunity to cultivate a garden again in spaces generously shared by friends and family.

I received BAs in Writing & Rhetoric Studies and Linguistics from the University of Utah in 2024. In my studies, I researched language change, use, and preservation, and I sought to understand the ways that words and ideas shape culture and our experience. In the Environmental Humanities Program, I plan to research the ways that people think about their relationship to food and how those views have been shaped by institutions. I want to encourage people to think more critically about the food that they eat and where it comes from, particularly with the goal of increasing food sovereignty and peoples’ connection to the land on which they live.

Outside of academia, I enjoy cooking and reading, and doing things that feel engaging for my mind and body. I can often be found cuddling with my cat, playing video games with my partner, and playing games with friends and (chosen) family.

I am a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla, born and raised in rural central Oregon. The high desert, mountains, and rivers raised me, and the place in between will forever be my home. This is where my love of Mother Earth and community blossomed— over witnessing the caring work of my parents, the laughter of my large family, and the relationship to traditional first foods carried throughout generations. 

I earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College, and have worked in social justice and climate movements ever since. For the last 7 years, I’ve led communications and narrative strategies for an international climate organization dedicated to uplifting the solutions and advocacy efforts of women leaders globally. My position required a holistic approach to support Indigenous and community-led projects, advocate for international environmental policy, document resistance to fossil fuels, uplift women’s leadership, and transform dominant climate narratives. Through my career, I’ve uncovered a deep passion for frameworks and advocacy that challenge extractive systems and transform narratives that define our relationship to the land and each other. 

As I join the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, I am interested in further developing theories and frameworks that contribute to building climate-resilient systems of justice, care, and community.  I look forward to engaging in diverse and creative models of knowledge creation that tell the story of our communities and connections to the land and each other, offering a pathway to the future we know is possible for all generations.  

In 2020 I moved to Salt Lake City and in my free-time I enjoy learning new skills (from beading to ceramics to sewing), engaging with the lands around me, connecting with friends and loved ones near and far, and dreaming of the possibilities that our Earth and communities carry. 

I am drawn to the Environmental Humanities by a desire to continue understanding how visual media shapes our perceptions of the environments we live within. I moved to the Southwest from Portland, Oregon in my early twenties on a naive impulse spurred by a Wim Wenders movie and pictures of canyons. I have spent the years since learning to unravel the romanticized fantasy of the Southwest from the reality of the region– the complexity and beauty of which could never be captured in a Western film or a postcard. I began this work by researching the intertwined  legacies of photography, settler colonialism, and the nuclear industry in New Mexico as an undergraduate student at Colorado College and as a research and teaching assistant at the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies. In this position, I collaborated with organizations like Las Pistoleras Instituto Cultural de Arte on community-oriented arts programming and led students on a multi-day nuclear history roadtrip through the region. Raft guiding on the Rio Grande,
coordinating the Taos Film Festival, and a lot of driving up and down I-25 are other cherished methods of mine.

At the University of Utah, I am looking forward to learning from local scholars, activists and artists about current nuclear issues affecting Utahns. I am inspired by the multidisciplinary approaches possible within the Environmental Humanities and hope to incorporate collaborative photographic methods, documentary filmmaking, and creative nonfiction writing into my work.

I was raised on the ancestral and unceded contemporary homelands of Shoshone, Dine, Goshute, Piute, and Ute tribes, in so-called Salt Lake City, Utah. I am grateful to have grown up in this valley nestled between the Apa-ya-wi-up (place of the weeping ancestors/Oquirrh), Wasatch mountains, and Pi'a-pa (Great Salt Lake).

As a Black diasporic person I have always been drawn to questions of place and the practices and relationships that construct our sense of home because I have not always felt so rooted. I have ancestral and familial ties to the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Egypt, and the African continent more broadly. I spent many of my childhood summers visiting my grandparents in Iowa, planting corn, picking strawberries and becoming familiar with the earth. Growing food I could share with those I love has been a grounding practice, strengthening my connection to both the more-than-human and my ancestry. 

I am excited to return to the University of Utah, where I completed degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies with a Persian emphasis in 2025. Throughout undergrad I worked with the Utah Division of Multicultural Affairs and Utah Prison Education Project to develop and lead educational programming for incarcerated youth. Most recently, I have been working with the STEM Community Alliance Program to start a community garden at a youth detention center in the valley. This practice has deepened my interest in gardens as deconstructive spaces, troubling borders between those inside of carceral spaces and those outside.

Through the environmental humanities, I hope to explore how our relationships to land are shaped by histories of racialization, displacement, incarceration, and resistance. I am particularly interested in Black and Indigenous solidarities, prison abolition, carceral geographies, liberatory pedagogies, Tidalectics, design and visual spatializations, necropolitics, and care work. My thinking is inspired by a long lineage of Black and Indigenous feminist scholars whose work asks us to radically re-imagine futures and kinship beyond structures of extraction.

Outside of the classroom I love house music, climbing rocks, baking, run on sentences, experimenting with clay, printmaking, and sewing, and long walks.

Born and raised in the southern Bay Area, I have always considered myself a Californian through-and-through. As a child of immigrants from Iran raised in a deeply diasporic community, I saw my own sense of place reflected back to me by my first-generation peers. We were building ourselves identities that were rooted there, but informed by so much more. I have carried this understanding with me throughout my academic and professional life — that our identities are continually shaped by the spaces and communities we inhabit. I left home for the first time to attend the University of California, Santa Barbara, planning to major in English and pursue a career in journalism. It was there that I was first exposed to the field that I find myself in now, and realized that writing was the lens through which I could study the world around me. I graduated with a degree in Environmental Studies and an emphasis in Geography in 2023. Through research in my undergraduate and beyond, I began to develop questions surrounding our ideas of place and those inhabiting it: specifically, how and why do human and non-human organisms move, and what happens when they do?

In the years following my undergraduate experience, I had the privilege of working in the environmental education field through nonprofits and local government. Moving to Salt Lake City has been a huge step for me, both in my personal life and for my research. I am so curious to see how my questions expand and are shaped through coming into contact with this vast, new ecosystem, and am immensely grateful for the opportunity to broaden my understanding of place, and my own sense of it, during my time here.

I grew up in northeastern Nevada among sagebrush hills and aspen-filled mountains. From early on, the outside was my safe space and I spent as much time as I could in quiet places, listening to the constant breeze of the Great Basin Desert play through the shrubs and grasses. After high school, I traded Nevada blue skies for the Big Sky state of Montana where I completed my BS in Fish and Wildlife Management and Ecology from Montana State University. With this degree I spent a beautiful decade in western Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem observing grizzly bears, tracking sage-grouse, handling deer, listening to songbirds, and caring for plants. I have worked for federal and state conservation agencies, including: the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks. I have worked for universities and for non-profit organizations to conduct wildlife field research as well. For the past few years, I have found my way into education and outreach, first working at the University of Utah’s Taft-Nicholson Center in the Centennial Valley. There I was able to help numerous groups of humans connect with the more-than-humans of that remote and spectacular corner of the world. Most recently I was the environmental educator at the Wood River YMCA in Sun Valley, ID, where I cared for a greenhouse and taught children from age 5 – 14 about gardening, wildlife, and composting. I really enjoyed watching these young minds become curious about the natural world around them, and being able to answer their many questions.

This shift from wildlife biology to pursuing education and outreach led me here to the Environmental Humanities Program. My interest here in the program lies in access to outdoor spaces and nature education experiences for children to learn about the world around them, regardless of their background. Through my time here, I hope to be able to connect with communities to teach children about the more-than-humans in their own backyards through science and art. Nature journalling, bird watching, plein air painting, plant walks, and children’s book writing/illustration are avenues I would love to explore.

Outside of class, I enjoy watercolor painting (mostly birds and plants), reading, trail running with many stops to forage edible and medicinal plants, dancing, and cross-country skiing!