American Environmental Historian William Cronon To Present Zucker Lectures at Yale University

American environmental historian William Cronon, who is the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be this fall’s Zucker Environmental Fellow. Cronon will lecture on “Humanist Environmentalism: A Manifesto” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 12, in Room 114 of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, corner of Grove and Prospect streets. The public is invited free of charge.

A historian who studies not only American environmental history but the history of the American West, Cronon focuses his research on ways human communities modify the landscapes in which they live, and how people, in turn, are affected by changing geological, climatological and ecological conditions. Cronon, who earned a Ph.D. degree from Yale and a D.Phil. degree from Oxford Unviersity, has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow and MacArthur Fellow.

Cronon joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in 1992 after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale history department. He also recently completed a three-year term as President of the American Society for Environmental History and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book Series for the University of Washington Press. Cronon is the author of several books, including “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England” (1983), and “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” (1991), which won several prizes including the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award. He most recently edited a collection of essays titled “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature” (1995), which examines the implication of different cultural ideas of nature for solving modern environmental problems.

The Zucker Environmental Fellowship was established in 1990 by Benjamin Zucker and Richard Zorn, both members of the class of 1962, to bring a public policy figure or author in the field of environmental studies to the campus each year.