Matthew Booker
Area(s) of Expertise
- Marine and estuarine environmental history
- Urban estuaries
- Wetlands destruction and restoration
- Toxicology
- Historical fisheries esp. aquaculture
- Social impacts of sea level rise
Research Summary
As an environmental historian, I examine the interactions of human societies and natural systems, particularly in coastal regions. My book Down By The Bay: San Francisco’s History Between The Tides (University of California Press, 2013) describes the intertwined histories of the West’s most important estuary and its first city. I tell the story of filling tidal marshes for urban development, draining interior wetlands for farmlands, the rise and fall of California’s urban oyster industry, and the creation of the nation’s first urban wildlife refuge in the industrial salt mines of San Francisco Bay, concluding with a discussion of the nation’s largest wetlands restoration project.
Publications
- The Seed Oyster Inspectors: Labor and Power in Trans-Pacific Tidelands, 1945-1970s , The Pacific Circle: History and Studies of Pacific Science (2023)
- Filth into Food? Lessons from the Past , (2022)
- Sweetness, Power, Yeasts, and Entomo-terroir , Animals, Plants and Afterimages: The Art and Science of Representing Extinction (2022)
- The diversity and function of sourdough starter microbiomes , eLife (2021)
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The status of striped bass,
Morone saxatilis, as a commercially ready species for U.S. marine aquaculture , Journal of the World Aquaculture Society (2021) - The ‘Pacific’ Oyster Trade and the Possibilities of Trans-Pacific Environmental History , Sixth Biennial Conference of East Asian Environmental History (2021)
- Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past , Ant, Spider, Bee: Chronicling Digital Transformations in the Humanities (2021)
- Why do People Care for Sourdough? , Fermentology (2021)
- Down By the Bay: San Francisco's History Between the Tides , University of California Press (2020)
- Integrating History into the Restoration of Coho Salmon in the Siuslaw River, Oregon , Sustainable Fisheries Management (2020)