Shepard Krech III

Born in New York City, educated at Yale (B.A.), Oxford (B.Litt.) and Harvard (Ph.D.), Shepard Krech III is professor of anthropology and environmental studies, and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, at Brown University. He has received major fellowships and grants from the National Humanities Center (twice), Woodrow Wilson International Center, NEH, Canadian Embassy, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. He has written more than 140 essays and reviews, has lectured widely, and is the author or editor of 10 books and monographs, including Praise the Bridge That Carries You Over; Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade; A Victorian Earl in the Arctic;The Subarctic Fur Trade; Collecting Native America, 1870-1960; The Ecological Indian; and Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (ed. with J. R. McNeill and C. Merchant).

The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W. W. Norton, 1999) has been discussed on radio coast-to-coast and reviewed or featured in 10 languages in more than 100 publications, including The New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement [TLS], Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education Supplement, Der Spiegel, NRC Handelsblad, and others. Reviewers remark that the book "teaches us everything we have wanted to know about American Indians and the environment" (New York Times), is "ground-breaking and myth-busting" (Wisconsin Public Radio), and "is what good science should be" (Detroit News). The book is most recently (2006) the subject of a session at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association and of the forthcoming Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (eds. M. Harkin and D. R. Lewis [U. Nebraska Press]) from a 2002 conference on The Ecological Indian in Laramie, Wyoming.

Critics refer to the three-volume Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (Routledge, 2004) as edited with "great insight and skill" (James G. Speth) and "the most ambitious effort yet to offer a comprehensive overview of the long-term history of human interactions with the natural world on a truly planetary scale" (William Cronon).

Shepard Krech III is a trustee of the National Humanities Center and past-president (2004-05) of the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is finishing Southern Indians and Birds (University of Georgia Press), a book on indigenous people and birds in the American South, and is at work on Native American conceptions of time and other topics. A lifelong birder and environmentalist, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and Sedgwick, Maine.