Program Directors
Conservation Land Management Program
Nathan F. Sayre is Program Co-Director of the Conservation Land Management Program and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has fifteen years’ experience working on conservation issues as both a scholar and an independent author and consultant.
During and after college, Nathan worked for the Iowa and Arizona Conservation Corps, supervising restoration and other projects on city, county, state and federal lands. In the course of this he became intrigued by the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona, an interest that later became the focus of his doctoral research in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Seeking to understand the opposition of area ranchers to the creation of the refuge—which had been a ranch for a century—Nathan explored the social, economic and environmental history of the valley and the Southwest, revealing the interactions of management, economics, science and politics in a complex ecological landscape. He published the results in Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (University of Arizona Press) in 2002
Subsequently, Nathan worked with several community-based conservation organizations in Arizona and New Mexico dedicated to resolving the so-called "rangeland conflict" between ranchers, environmentalists and government agencies. For the Quivira Coalition, he wrote The New Ranch Handbook: A Guide to Restoring Western Rangelands (2001), which synthesized the latest findings of ecology and range science with profiles of ranchers who had achieved both ecological and economic success through innovative management. His work with the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance, the Sonoran Institute, and the Malpai Borderlands Group addressed complex regulatory challenges involving livestock grazing, fire management, and endangered species. He also served for four years as a technical advisor to Pima County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, an ambitious effort to craft a Habitat Conservation Plan for more than fifty rare or endangered plant and animal species in the county.
As a post-doctoral researcher with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service-Jornada Experimental Range, Nathan extended his explorations of ranch management, ecological change and landscape-scale conservation. His findings were published in Conservation Biology, The Journal of Range Management, and in his 2005 book, Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range.
Since coming to Berkeley in 2004, Nathan’s teaching and research have focused on human-environment interactions in the Southwest and elsewhere. In addition to rangelands, his interests include global warming, ideas of carrying capacity, and the challenge of integrating ecological and geographical theories of scale.
Mark Stromberg is Program Co-Director of the Conservation Land Management Program. He grew up in the desert grasslands at the base of the Sandia mountains in New Mexico. Inspired by a youth spent outdoors, Mark went on to graduate studies in animal and plant ecology and worked for non-profit land conservation organizations in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. For the last 20 years, Mark has been the resident reserve director of a biological field station associated with UC Berkeley, located in the oak woodlands and savannas of central coast of California.
