Paul Hirt

Bio

Associate Professor of History, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Paul Hirt is a historian specializing in the American West, global environmental history, environmental policy and sustainability studies. He is a Senior Sustainability Scholar in the School of Sustainability and a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Environmental Social Science PhD program, the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology PhD program, and the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning. From 2006-2010 Dr. Hirt served as the Director of Graduate Studies for History.

Hirt's publications include a monograph on the history of national forest management since WWII (A Conspiracy of Optimism, 1994), two edited collections of essays on Northwest history (Terra Pacifica, 1998 and Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples, 1999), and more than two-dozen articles and book chapters on environmental and western history. Hirt's current research projects include (1) a monograph on the history of electric power in the US Northwest and British Columbia; (2) collaborative interdisciplinary research on water use, urban growth and sustainability in southern Arizona with scholars at the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS) and Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC); (3) a public education program on "Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon," in partnership with the Grand Canyon Association and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities http://grandcanyonhistory.clas.asu.edu/ and (4) a research, teaching and outreach program on environmental history and conservation of the Sky Islands borderlands region of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua. Hirt has served as a book and manuscript reviewer for more than a dozen academic presses and journals and has held positions on several editorial boards and professional association program and prize committees. From 2007-2011 he served on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Environmental History and in 2011 joined the editorial board of the journal Environmental HIstory. In his private life he is involved with regional conservation organizations, serving on the board of directors of the Sky Island Alliance based in Tucson, Arizona from 2002-2011: http://www.skyislandalliance.org/

Research Interests

Public lands, water resources, energy production and consumption, natural resources management, the conservation movement and environmentalism, environmental policy and problem-solving, urban growth, sustainability.