Robert Marks

Robert B. Marks is Emeritus Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Whittier College where he served for 41 years. While there he taught, researched, and published on the environmental histories of China and the world becoming widely known for his pioneering and award-winning scholarship. Since retirement in 2019 he researched and wrote a new book in the field of the environmental history of the American West, Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History over the Last 10,000 Years.

His scholarship traces the deep connections between nature and society across continents and centuries, spanning China’s environmental transformation, the origins of the modern world economy, and the 10,000-year history of California’s Mono Lake Basin—revealing how human actions and natural forces shape the places we inhabit.