Everglades NP

Mount Katahdin

My current book project is:

Building the American Green State: The States, the Federal Government, and Intercurrence, 1800-2000 (in progress)

Environmental policymaking in the U.S. can be a byzantine process of different laws, different agencies, and different levels of government. Of great significance is the overlap of federal and state laws and institutions, often passed or created at different times and underscoring different goals and interests. These overlaps and intersections, termed intercurrence, can lead to tremendous policy challenges—conflict, chaos, and contingency, yet opportunities as well. This book traces the development of the green state at the state and national levels from the U.S. founding through 2000, and examines how this green state development helps lead to intercurrence based in historical time and spatially between states and the federal government. 

Wind Cave NP

North Cascades NP

American Environmental Policy: Beyond Gridlock, updated and expanded edition, 2013, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, co-author (with David J. Sousa).

The first edition of the book, which won the American Political Science Association’s 2008 Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for best book in environmental politics and policy, examined the forces leading to gridlock on national environmental policy in the United States from 1990-2006. We argue that this has not translated into policy gridlock; rather policy has moved onto other pathways: appropriations and budget politics, executive politics, the courts, collaboration, and the states. This revised edition updates our narrative, from 2006-2012.

The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History, 2d ed., 2015, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, co-author (with Stephen C. Trombulak).

In this second edition we both update the story of the Vermont landscape as shaped by geological, biological, and cultural forces as well as more fully integrate our discussions of natural history with cultural history.

My previous scholarship has focused on two main areas:

1. American political development and conservation, resource management, and environmental quality, which resulted in a book and articles in Political Science Quarterly, Natural Resources Journal, Polity, Studies in American Political Development, and Policy Studies Journal, as well as several book chapters.

Who Controls Public Lands?: Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policies, 1870-1990, 1996, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

2. Conservation policy in New England, including two edited books:

Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast, editor, 2001, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

The Future of the Northern Forest, 1994, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, co-editor (with Stephen C. Trombulak).