Peter Alagona| 2024 July
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Peter Alagona is an environmental historian, historian of science, conservation scientist, and nature-culture geographer. His work explores what happens when humans share space and resources (their habitats) with other species: how we interact with non-human creatures, how we make sense of these interactions, why we fight so much about them, what we can learn from them, and how we might use these lessons to foster a more just, peaceful, humane, and sustainable society. Most of Peter's research has focused on human interactions with wildlife in North America. A second area of interest involves developing creative interdisciplinary, collaborative, and mixed methods for studying ecological change over multiple time periods and scales.
While in Residence, Peter will be working on a book about the California grizzly bear. In 1800, California was home to as many as ten thousand grizzly bears. Grizzlies roamed throughout the state, from the northwest forest to the edge of the Mojave Desert, and from the High Sierra to the Los Angeles Basin. Native peoples forged rich mythologies about and complex relationships with grizzlies, which they regarded as friends, neighbors, guides, healers, adversaries, resources, and kin. Later European settlers recorded detailed accounts of their experiences with California’s legendary “chaparral bears,” leaving behind a vast archive of documents and artifacts. After 1849, California’s grizzly population collapsed in a violent frenzy of hunting, trapping, and poisoning. The last credible sighting of a California grizzly occurred in 1924 near Sequoia National Park. In 2016, Peter Alagona assembled a group of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to conduct the first significant research on California grizzlies in several decades. In the years since, this group has grown into a network that includes scholars from multiple institutions in North America and Europe, and has published more than a dozen academic articles showing that almost everything we once thought we knew about California’s famous grizzly bears—that they were gigantic, hypercarnivorous, and genetically unique, that they terrorized Native peoples, only lived on coastlines and in brushy woodlands, and that went extinct mainly due to habitat loss—was wrong. Most of all, we were wrong that their extinction was inevitable and that their recovery is impossible. The campaign to recover grizzly bears in California will officially begin in 2024. Alagona is now writing a book that will retell this story, and reflect on what it says not only for grizzly bears, but also for the future of conservation itself. Website: www.peteralagona.com
Click here to hear Peter Alagona and Program Director Nina Simon discuss Peter's Residency talk on KNCE.
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