Nancy Langston

I am author of Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale, 2017), and 3 earlier books. I am an environmental historian and professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. For 18 years, I taught in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I served as president of the American Society for Environmental History from 2007-2009. You can visit my website at www.nancylangston.com and the website for Toxic Bodies at www.toxicbodies.org

My initial training was as an ecologist rather than a historian. While on a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington, I researched the evolutionary ecology of Carmine bee-eaters nesting along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. My experiences in African conservation persuaded me that to understand (and reverse) environmental degradation, we needed to pay much closer attention to human communities. Understanding the historic roots of environmental change became my primary research focus.

My first book, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (University of Washington Press, 1995) examines the causes of the forest health crisis on western national forests. My second book, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (University of Washington Press, 2003) focuses on dilemmas over riparian management in the West. My third book, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES, was published in 2010 by Yale University Press.

Four months of the year, I live in a tiny cabin on Lake Superior, near Cornucopia. While the university is in session, I live with my husband (Frank Goodman), two pit bulls (Tiva and Vanya), eighteen chickens, and 100,000 (more or less) honeybees on the Little Sugar River Farm, a small farm south of Madison. I am an avid sea kayaker and cross-country skier.