Graduate students at CU Boulder’s Environmental Studies department are leading research on critical global challenges like species conservation, ecological economics, and food security. Researchers like Christian Suarez, Waverly Eichhorst, and Margaret Hegwood are tackling today’s most pressing environmental issues, shaping the future of food policy and environmental conservation efforts worldwide. 

The Environmental Studies Colloquium Series plays an important role in this process, providing a platform for students to present their work, gain feedback, and collaborate with peers and experts. This exchange of ideas helps refine research and drives real-world impact, ensuring that CU Boulder’s graduate students remain at the forefront of sustainable policy development. 

Christian Suarez: Exploring the Economics of Conservation 

Christian Suarez, a second-year PhD student at CU Boulder, is focusing on the intersection of economics and environmental conservation. With a background in economics and political science, Christian’s academic journey into environmental studies began in 2020. 

Christian’s current research investigates the role of ecological economics in shaping conservation policies. He explores concepts like contingent valuation, willingness to pay, and the economic trade-offs in species reintroduction. One of his first jumping-off points is examining Colorado's grey wolf reintroduction, the first democratically elected species reintroduction in world history. 

As Christian refines his research going forward, one thing that remains vital is understanding how public perception drives conservation policy, and how economic reasoning helps incentivize policymakers to prioritize conservation efforts within a budget-constrained framework. 

Waverly Eichorst: Addressing Food Security through Singapore’s 30 by 30 Initiative 

Waverly, another talented graduate student at CU Boulder, is researching Singapore’s "30 by 30" initiative, which aims to locally produce 30% of the country’s food by 2030. Singapore imports over 90% of its food and has less than 1% of land available for agriculture, making this initiative a crucial case study for global food production/security policies. 

Supported by NIFA and USDA, Waverly is investigating the real-world impacts of Singapore's policies on agricultural productivity. Through on-site farm visits and interviews, she is assessing the technical, financial, and regulatory challenges that Singapore’s agricultural sector faces, such as high production costs and a lack of consumer demand for local produce. Her research aims to uncover strategies for Singapore to overcome these challenges through innovation, R&D, and diversified agricultural products. 

Waverly’s findings could have far-reaching implications, not only for Singapore but for global efforts to enhance food security. 

Margaret Hegwood: U.S. Food System Regulation 

Margaret Hegwood, a fifth-year PhD student in CU Boulder’s Environmental Studies department, is researching food system regulation in the United States. Supported by the USDA and CIRES’ Center for Social and Environmental Futures (C-SEF), part of Margaret’s dissertation is centered on the regulatory frameworks that shape the U.S. food system.  

Margaret delved into the intricacies of the U.S. regulatory system, discussing what regulations are, who enforces them, and the pros and cons of the current framework for food systems. Margaret’s research sheds light on differences in how regulations impact low-emission versus high-emission food industries, offering insights into the effectiveness of environmental policies. 

The insights gained from her work could have significant implications for the future of food system regulation and policy in the U.S.  

Leading the Charge in Environmental Policy 

These graduate students at CU Boulder demonstrate the department's commitment to addressing complex environmental challenges through interdisciplinary research. From the economics of species reintroduction to global food security and U.S. food system regulation, their work is laying the groundwork for sustainable, impactful environmental policies. Stay tuned for updates on their progress and learn how their research is driving change for a more sustainable future. 

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As the Fall semester approaches, we are pleased to officially announce that Warren Cook and Nirav Patel have just joined our CU Boulder ENVS community as Teaching Assistant Profess.

Warren Cook (he/him) is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Environmental Studies and a PhD Candidate of Communication (Rhetoric and Culture) in the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. Warren’s research and teaching focuses on the rhetoric of environmental politics, especially water justice in the U.S. American West. His work has been published in Environmental Justice and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He received his BA in History and Interdisciplinary Honors from Westminster University and his MA in Communication (Rhetoric and Culture) at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Dr Nirav S. Patel is a trained natural and social scientist with a PhD from Cornell University and possesses expertise in human dimensions and has been involved in issues of sustainable development, with emphasis on the linkages between environmental and socio-economic systems. As the inaugural Civic Education and Engagement and Civil Discourse Fellows (2024-25) appointed by the Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), Dr Patel has engaged local/state and international partners through research and education initiatives that yield collaborative experience which deepens engagements on integrative environmental science. He has developed and led novel course(s) which utilize experiential learning to teach civic engagement at the confluence of Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus, Global Health, and Urban Ecology. He has been successful in creating science-based community engagement to engage in building collaboration for PFAS testing in food packaging linking consumer preferences and its effect on waste streams to ecological corridors.  Dr Patel is recipient of multiple fellowship awards as well as teaching excellence awards over the last decade.

Welcome Warren and Nirav!

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repost of article by Rachel Sauer 

Almost every night, Tyler Nuckols can hear fireworks and shouting—not celebrating a holiday or marking an occasion, but trying to drive elephants back into the forest.

In , where Nuckols is conducting socio-ecological fieldwork as he pursues a PhD in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, elephants emerge from the trees of Kui Buri National Park almost every night in search of pineapple.

Over many years, elephants have learned that an easy and accessible meal is in farmers’ fields—to the detriment of those fields and farmers’ livelihoods. As farmers lose their source of income and means of supporting their families, elephants risk injury or worse as farmers—also risking injury or worse—try to deter them.

For a lot of people—mainly those who don’t coexist with elephants—this may not seem like much of a problem. Elephants, after all, are among the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals, credited with an emotional range that some claim matches or even exceeds that of humans. People visit a zoo and return home daydreaming about backyard elephants.

But on , being celebrated today, Nuckols emphasizes that the challenges and successes of human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation that communities and populations worldwide are tackling as climate change fundamentally reshapes how humans coexist with wildlife.

“We’re interested in supporting and partnering with local communities to look at solutions to human-elephant conflict beyond the predominant approaches of ‘Where do you farm? What do you farm? How much money do you make farming?’” Nuckols explains.

"Our research and community-based conservation approach looks to explore a more complex focus related to factors like identity, access to resources and historical and political factors, among many more layers that may shape how households can engage in solutions to human-elephant conflict and participate in the first place."

Studying coexistence

Nuckols has been working with elephants for more than 10 years, starting with the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia—an ethical sanctuary and retirement home for elephants that had worked in tourism or logging. After earning a master’s degree at Colorado State University, and after COVID curtailed his plans to return to Cambodia to study mitigation techniques to prevent elephants from entering agricultural fields, he began working with Karen Bailey, a CU Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies who leads the

Bailey completed postdoctoral research in southern Africa with communities living outside protected areas “who were living with the threats of climate change and the impact of sharing the landscape with wildlife,” she says. “Some of the impacts of crop raiding by elephants in southern Africa were significant predictors of potential food insecurity. When that’s combined with the threats of changing seasons and changing climate as well, the realities of human-elephant coexistence in communities in and outside of conservation areas become really pronounced.”

As part of the working group with the human-elephant coexistence research organization , Bailey and Nuckols partner with researchers and conservation groups from around the world to study the reasons for conflict between agriculturalists and elephants, as well as develop and test interventions that support livelihoods and work to rebuild community resilience and landscapes in different countries and cultures.

Nuckols began researching in Thailand in 2022, partnering with NGO to study human-elephant conflict and how elephants interact with different types of agricultural crops. Nuckols’ research also focuses on environmental justice and resilience, and how communities define ecological justice for both humans and elephants.

The community where Nuckols’ research is based is not only a human-elephant conflict hot spot, but also a success story for conservation and community-based tourism.

“But despite the positive impacts of tourism and some grassroots efforts, conflict occurs every night,” Nuckols says. “You can hear fireworks and shouting and people trying to get elephants back into the forest every night. So, one of the ideas that community members are evaluating is crop transition. Research has shown that elephants won’t eat lemongrass, ginger, chili, citronella, so farmers are interested in growing these crops, but the community is asking how to ensure it’s sustainable and equitable.

“Changing crops is a high-risk decision, when they know they can sell monocrop pineapple that they’ve been growing for decades.”

Risk vs. reward

A significant challenge in human-elephant coexistence is the disconnect between people actually living with or near elephants and the rest of the world that is watching and loves elephants, or at least the idea of elephants.

“Even in Thailand, there’s a huge disconnect between major urban centers like Bangkok and rural provinces,” Nuckols explains. “These farmers are often villainized or portrayed as invaders. They’ve been told they should just pack up and give elephants back their habitat, but that’s not feasible or tenable or just for those people who are being told to leave. It’s very grim, but we’ve had people die in our community from negative encounters with elephants, victims who’ve been attacked in the night while they were guarding their crops.”

Bailey notes that while the world may be watching and feeling invested in the plight of elephants, “there’s an inherent framing of environmental justice that we more equally share the costs and benefits of the environment. We as people globally benefit from elephants existing—we get a warm feeling when we think about them—but we have to remind people that there are costs. We have to think about how to more equitably share the costs and benefits. Anyone who loves elephants and might call themselves an elephant person should know and should be clear that elephant conservation simply will not work if we don’t think about those humans and elevate the human components.”

A complicating factor in some climate change discourse is the argument that humans caused it and animals are blameless in it, so animals should be prioritized in human decision making. “The important nuance is that the rural farmers in Thailand didn’t do this,” Bailey says.

“It’s the wealthy individuals all over the world who are, per capita, emitting many more tons of carbon. There’s an inherent inequity in who is causing the environmental problems, and often the people and communities experiencing the realities of environmental change aren’t key drivers of this change.”

In the community where Nuckols is studying, which is in the rain shadow of a mountain range, drought is a very serious concern. During the last dry season, the reservoir that supplies water to the community nearly dried up. Many farmers in the area grow pineapple for many reasons, one of which is that it’s considered a crop that can survive in high-heat and low-water conditions.

“In the past few years, though, temperatures in the field can soar to 43, 44 (Celsius) and so even now pineapple is struggling to survive,” Nuckols says. “Those conditions are also driving elephants more and more to the edge of the national park, where a lot of the habitat restoration has been funded by large corporate subsidiaries that don’t have time to trek into the forest and dig a water hole.

“So, you get a concentration of elephants on the edge of the forest, and as climate change gets worse, as resources get more sparse in the forest, elephants are going to go for high energy, high reward crops like pineapple. In a short hour they can devour an entire patch of pineapple that gives them the nutrients and sugar they would spend days foraging for in the dry forest. It’s basic risk versus reward.”

Just listen

In researching the complex factors influencing human-elephant conflict and coexistence, Nuckols emphasizes that a foundational principle of the work is that it’s community-driven and community-led.

“We’re involved in study and data collection, but we do everything in a framework of participatory action research,” Nuckols explains. “We pilot everything we do with focus groups in the local community, we run everything by a group of trusted stakeholders like the village chief and elders working with our organization. We ask them, ‘Is this appropriate?’ and a lot of things were thrown out the window because they’re like, ‘No way.’

“The whole group that’s growing and testing alternative crops now, which is 16 people, are community members who created a collective and are working together. We as researchers act as a bridge to help support the trial, to help find funding. We use our skills to elevate the work that this community is already doing.”

Bailey adds that the lessons learned in researching human-elephant coexistence—though the details can vary broadly between cultures, countries and regions—may inform human-wildlife coexistence in other areas, including Colorado.

“There are tons of parallels and tons of lessons to be learned that we can apply more broadly,” Nuckols says. “One of the biggest is just to listen to community members and help empower those community members. Don’t ever go in assuming you know best. Spend time in the community and pilot your work before you go in and think anything is going to work within a community. Make sure community members feel heard, have a meaningful seat at the table and feel empowered to solve these problems.”

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We are thrilled to announce that Emma Galofré García, a PhD student in ENVS, has been selected as a , along with her advisor, Dr. Karen Bailey! The Gilliam Fellows Program financially supports each student-adviser pair for up to three years of the student’s dissertation research. For Emma, the fellowship will support her ongoing research in ecology.

This year's cohort of 50 exceptional student-adviser pairs were selected from a field of over 700 applications, the most in the program’s history! Hailing from a record 43 institutions – ten of which are receiving a Gilliam Fellowship for the first time – these students and faculty reflect the incredible breadth of scientific talent that exists throughout our country.

Congratulations Emma and Karen!

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Dr. Joanna Lambert and current PhD Student, Alma "Rosie" Sanchez have been working for years on the Colorado wolf reintroduction initiative. Now, a film series tells the success story of this initiaitve, which is the first time a federally protected endangered species has been reintroduced via a democratic vote/ballot initiative. The first film of the series features both Dr. Lambert and Rosie! It premiered on July 18, and was followed by a speaker panel in which Dr. Lambert participated (as shown in image). 

See the film trailer below and learn more about this incredible iniative .

[video:https://vimeo.com/979366728] 

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