Job title:
Assistant Professor (beginning July 2027)
Bio/CV:
Paul Berne Burow is an environmental anthropologist who studies how cultural values shape climate adaptation, land stewardship, and environmental governance in California and the American West. He joins the ERG faculty in July 2027.
Dr. Burow's research develops moral ecology as a framework for understanding how communities value, know, and relate to the landscapes they call home, and how those values are recognized or excluded in environmental decision-making. Working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, human-environment geography, and the Indigenous environmental sciences, he combines ethnography and ethnoecology with household surveys, participatory mapping, and spatial analysis. This work is grounded in long-term, community-engaged partnerships with Tribal Nations, community-based organizations, rural communities, and land management agencies, using co-produced research designs and protocols for Tribal data sovereignty.
His current research investigates collaborative forest stewardship between Tribal Nations and federal land management agencies in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin. He asks how Indigenous knowledge, cultural values, and governance institutions shape what shared stewardship achieves for both community wellbeing and ecosystem health. He is developing an applied framework for integrating cultural ecosystem services into forest stewardship planning. He is also leading a longitudinal study of climate resilience and rural wellbeing in the Eastern Sierra.
His book manuscript, Good Country: Land Stewardship and Belonging in the American West, examines the cultural politics of environmental change through the experiences of Paiute, Washoe, and Shoshone communities, federal land managers, conservationists, and ranchers navigating social and ecological transformation. A new area of research examines agricultural land transitions and environmental justice in California's San Joaquin Valley.
He is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University's combined doctoral program in Forestry & Environmental Science and Anthropology, an M.Phil. in Anthropology and an MESc. in Forestry & Environmental Science from Yale, and a B.A. from the University of California, Davis.
Dr. Burow will be recruiting graduate students for entry in fall 2027 or later. More information about the group's research and how to get in touch is at https://paulburow.org/research-group.
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