Peter Coates, Professor of American and Environmental History in the School of Humanities (Historical Studies) at the University of Bristol, is co-author (with William Beinart) of Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (Routledge, 1995) and the author of the award-winning Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy (University of Alaska Press, 1993), Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Polity/University of California Press, 1998), Salmon (Reaktion Books, 2006) and American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (University of California Press, 2007). He has also published articles in journals such as Alaska History (nuclear engineering projects), Environmental History (atomic testing; the history of sound and noise), Environment and History (a critical survey of environmental history writing in the Americas), Western Historical Quarterly (buffalo), The Public Historian (the Trans-Alaska Pipeline after twenty years), Landscape Research (non-native species), California History (landscapes of labour & leisure) and Journal of American Studies (English sparrows). He has served as the UK and Ireland representative for the European Society for Environmental History and is currently a member of the executive committee of the American Society for Environmental History. He also belongs to the editorial collective for the journal Environment and History.
When he’s not thinking about militarized landscapes or rivers (his other current research interest), he likes to swim in cold water, eat Alaskan salmon, read The New Yorker and walk in local uplands like Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Black Mountains. What he really wants to do, though, is write the definitive history of the avocado.
