Contact
Email:
mmbooker@ncsu.edu
Matthew Morse Booker studies the interactions of human beings and the natural world, particularly on urban coasts. His book Down By The Bay: San Francisco’s History Between The Tides is the first history of the American West's most important estuary and its first city, from the Gold Rush to the creation of the nation’s first urban wildlife refuge. At the Rachel Carson Center he will investigate the rise, collapse, and recovery of oysters in the American diet as part of his larger project on why Americans stopped eating locally in the twentieth century. Matthew did his PhD at Stanford University and is an associate professor of American environmental history at North Carolina State University.
RCC Research Project: "Why Did Americans Lose Their Faith in Local Food?"
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Why Did Americans Stop Eating Locally in the Twentieth Century?
Selected publications:
- Review of The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California's Great Central Valley, by Philip Garone. Submitted to H-Environment Roundtable Reviews. www.h‐net.org/~environ/roundtables/
- Down By the Bay: San Francisco’s History Between the Tides. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.
- "Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Environmental History," Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (2012): 3.
- "Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay," Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 1 (2006): 63–88.