History

Gary Paul Nabhan (1952- ) is an ecologist, ethnobotanist, and writer whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest. An ethnobotanist is an ethnologist who studies relationships between people from various cultures and their plants. ... Regional definitions vary from source to source. ...

A first generation Lebanese-American, Nabhan was raised in Gary, Indiana. He served as Director of Science at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to preserve indigenous southwestern agricultural plants as well as knowledge of their uses. Nabhan is currently director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. This article is about the city in Indiana, for other uses of Gary, see Gary (disambiguation). ... The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is one of the most visited attractions in Tucson, Arizona. ... In biology and ecology endemic means exclusively native to a place or biota, in contrast to cosmopolitan or introduced. ... Northern Arizona University (NAU) is a university in Flagstaff, Arizona in the United States. ...

Among his books are The Desert Smells Like Rain, Cultures of Habitat, Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation, Cross-pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, and Gathering the Desert, which won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing. He was also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. The John Burroughs Medal, named for nature writer John Burroughs (1837-1921), is awarded each year in April by the John Burroughs Association to the author of a book that the association has judged to be distinguished in the field of natural history. ... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution. ...

Nabhan has been a significant contributor in calling attention to the environmental issue of pollinator decline. He co-authored with Stephen L. Buchmann one of the key works on the topic - Forgotten Pollinators. Pollinator decline is based on observations made at the end of the twentieth century of the reduction in abundance of pollinators in many ecosystems worldwide. ...

External link

• Official Site: Gary Nabhan
• Whole Terrain link to Nabhan's articles published in Whole Terrain