Nathan Sayre

Job title: 
Professor
Department: 
Geography Department
Bio/CV: 

Professor Nathan Sayre is a human geographer with interests in the transformation and management of the earth’s environment. His research centers on semi-arid rangelands, especially in the southwestern United States: how they have changed, how they have been understood and managed, and the politics and economics surrounding land use change, fire restoration, and endangered species conservation. He has written four books and dozens of articles on these topics. He is a board member of the Malpai Borderlands Group, and affiliated social scientist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service-Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Jornada Basin Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, and the USDA’s Southwest Climate Hub. He is also affiliated with UC-Berkeley’s Energy Resources Group, the Berkeley Food Institute, and the UC Natural Reserve System’s Institute for the Study of Ecological & Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI). 

Professor Sayre’s teaching interests and philosophy reflect a broad training in the social sciences and more specialized expertise in Western environmental history, range ecology and management, environmental regulation and pastoralism. He also co-teaches a course on Global Warming with Professor John Chiang.

His research interests include ranching and pastoralism, rangeland ecology and management, history of range science, endangered species, scale, the state, Western environmental history, local ecological knowledge, conservation and urbanization/land use change.

Research interests: 

Environmental geography; social dimensions of rangeland ecology and management; environmental history; scale; political economy; climate change; food; regional focus: southwestern US, northwestern Mexico, arid and semiarid rangelands.