Adam M. Sowards is an environmental historian who focuses on North America, especially the West, and is affiliate faculty in environmental science and water resources. A prize-winning historian, he has primarily focused on the American conservation movement and forest history. Sowards is interested in how environment and culture affect scientific inquiry and environmental management. He is especially interested in the history of public lands. He works with UI students, faculty and other collaborators on regional environmental history projects, especially ones that focus on forest and water use and management. Sowards has been at the University of Idaho since 2003 and has been active in interdisciplinary teaching, research and service. He has worked with dozens of graduate students in many academic programs, besides the hundreds of undergraduates who have passed through his classroom.

• North American Environmental History
• History of the North American West
• History of Science

Publications

• Editor. Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
• The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009.
• United States West Coast: An Environmental History. Nature and Human Societies Series, ed. Mark Stoll. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007.

Guest Journal Editing

•  Editor. “Environmentalism in the American West.” Special issue, Journal of the West 50, no. 1 (Winter 2011).

Selected Journal Articles

• “Protecting American Lands with Justice William O. Douglas.” George Wright Forum 32, no. 2 (2015): 165-73. http://www.georgewright.org/322sowards.pdf)
• “Mobile Nature, Cooperative Management, and Institutional Adaptation in Pacific Northwest Blister Rust Control in the 20^th Century.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 105, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 159-74. (with Rebecca Stunz)  
•  “Making the Idaho Landscape of 1863.” Idaho Landscapes (March 2013): 5-17.
• “Roots and Branches: Environmentalism and the American West.” In “Environmentalism in the American West,” edited by Adam M. Sowards. Special issue, Journal of the West 50, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9-12.
• “‘We’re All Kinda Crazy’: Smokejumpers and Western Forests.” In “Talking Green: Oral History and Environmental History,” edited by Alan MacEachern and Ryan O’Connor. Special issue, Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 30 (2010).
• “From Virgin Forest to Modern Farm: Picturing Ecological Change in Northern Idaho’s Cutover Land.” Idaho Yesterdays 50, no. 2 (Fall 2009).

Selected Book Chapters

• “Rexford Daubenmire and the Ecology of Place: Applied Ecology in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American West.” In New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, edited by Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland, 313-40. New York: Springer, 2015. 297-322.
• With Paul Hirt. “The Past and Future of the Columbia River.” In The Columbia River Treaty Revisited: Transboundary River Governance in the Face of Uncertainty, edited by Barbara Cosens, 115-36. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2012.

• Associate Editor, History for a Sustainable Future Book Series, MIT Press
• Sponsored lecture series through the Institute for Pacific Northwest History
• American Society for Environmental History, serving on several professional committees

• Idaho Book Award (Honorable Mention)--Idaho Library Association (for Idaho's Place: A New History of the Gem State)
• Leadership Academy, University of Idaho, 2011-12
• Association for American University Presses Books for Understanding, U.S. Supreme Court, for The Environmental Justice, 2010
• Outstanding Faculty Award, Environmental Science Program, University of Idaho, 2009-10
• Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008, for United States West Coast An Environmental History
• University of Idaho Alumni Association Award for Faculty Excellence, 2008