Some time ago, I transitioned my career from discovery-based ecological research that has distant applications to conservation, to synthesis-based analysis and education that more immediately affect conservation practice and capacity generation. By 2000, I had become dissatisfied with a research agenda that diagnoses the threats to biodiversity from human development and explores theoretical questions in model systems. Although I am very proud of my work with Clarkia concinna, which had comprised a primary focus of my work, I am more highly motivated to focus my energies more directly. Thus, I have turned first to more applied research in a long-term collaborative project on avian conservation in Puerto Rico, and then to an extensive revision of a major advanced conservation biology textbook, and finally to a series of shorter analytic projects undertaken at the specific request of individuals from major conservation organizations.

I now focus my scholarship primarily on educating future conservationists and current practitioners, and to efforts to help create a more inclusive conservation field. I am fascinated by the potential in this field to fully weave social and environmental justice into its concerns and practices, and to couple ecological and cultural practices in conservation practices. I am the faculty lead of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at UW, and also an active member of the equity, inclusion and diversity and education committees of the Society for Conservation Biology and its North American chapter. In addition to education research, I continue to collaborate in landscape-scale studies of sustainability in urban community gardens, and am interested in collaborations that work to simultaneously improve wildlife populations and human welfare. Most recently, I have been working on developing open-access curricula for teaching about energy justice in the age of climate change, and about biocultural conservation.