W. Jeffrey Bolster is a Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Bolster has written about a wide range of topics concerning human interaction with the oceans. An expert in maritime history, Prof. Bolster’s first book, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997) grew out of his doctoral dissertation completed at The Johns Hopkins University. More recently, Prof. Bolster published a series of articles about the environment of the north Atlantic culminating with his second book, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (2012). The Mortal Sea won, among other awards, the prestigious Bancroft Prize for excellence in American history in 2013.

Paul S. Sutter is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas under the direction of Donald Worster, Prof. Sutter has gone on to author Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002) and a number of articles about environmental history in the United States and across the globe. He also edited Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009) and is the current editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series, published by the University of Washington Press. Prof. Sutter’s next book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South, and his current book project is entitled Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-1914.