Bruce Byers
Bruce grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He attended Stanford University and graduated from the interdisciplinary Human Biology Program, then earned master’s and PhD degrees in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Colorado Boulder. After teaching and conducting research for twelve years at the University of Colorado and directing an interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, he moved to Washington, DC, in 1992, to further develop his international, interdisciplinary, and applied-science interests. As an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in the USAID Office of Environment and Natural Resources, Bruce served for two years as a scientific advisor on biodiversity conservation and natural resource management issues, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
Bruce Byers Consulting, his independent ecological consulting business, was founded in 1994 to assist a range of clients in the United States and abroad. In 1997, Bruce honed his interests in applied social sciences and human ecology with a one-year Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Zimbabwe’s Centre for Applied Social Sciences, where taught graduate students and conducted a study of community-based conservation and sacred forests. Between 1996 and 2004, he continued to teach short courses at Colorado College and the University of Colorado, and conducted research on fire ecology with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. His international ecological research and consulting career has now taken him to more than 40 countries.
Bruce was the resident ecologist at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast In the fall of 2018, where he began working on a book of creative nonfiction essays, The View from Cascade Head: Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast, published by Oregon State University Press in 2020. (Cascade Head is one of twenty-eight international biosphere reserves in the United States that are part of an international network organized by UNESCO; Bruce has visited 35 UNESCO biosphere reserves in 17 countries.) His second book, Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast, a sequel focusing on California’s two coastal biosphere reserves, Golden Gate and Channel Islands, was published in 2024.
Bruce is currently engaged in several new writing projects and continues his independent ecological consulting work.
