I am an applied cultural anthropologist who examines themes of environmental crisis, precarity, and cultural continuity and change from the perspective of political ecology. I have researched and published on related themes including environmental change and cannabis cultivation (in press), ecological crisis and migration (2021), natural resource extraction and disposable labor (2020), the effects of global climate change on health and somatic stability (2019), waste infrastructure and development (2018), ethnographic methods (2016), and unequal ecological exchange (2015). My international research programs in Andes-Amazonia and Central America center on how polluted waterscapes relate to people’s insecurity, instability, and well-being.

My current project builds conduits between landscape ecology, multispecies ethnography, and Indigenous studies to trace the social histories of biotic lifeforms in wildland-urban transition zones on California’s Redwood Coast, a region experiencing sea level rise at a faster rate than anywhere else on the West Coast. The question driving this research is: What can the social biographies of flora, fauna, fungi, and microorganisms in disturbed landscapes teach us about human precarity and survivance in this moment of climate crisis?