As a celebration of our alumni, each month we will highlight a new book written by one of Oxford's North American-based alumni.
Our August 2020 book is "Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam" by Pamela McElwee (Wadham, 1993).
Pamela McElwee is an Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. She obtained her Ph.D. in both anthropology and forestry and environmental studies at Yale University. She teaches and writes about global environmental problems, with specific expertise in the human dimensions of biodiversity conservation, forest ecological restoration, and climate change. Her first book, Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (2016, U of Washington Press) examined a century of environmental policy in that country, and won the European Association of Southeast Asianists (EuroSEAS) Best Book in Social Science award in 2017.
Her latest book project is an environmental history of the Vietnam War, which will examine how nature shaped military strategies for both Vietnam and the US, and explore the politics of ecological restoration in the post-war era as an example of how to resolve environmental impacts after conflicts. She was recently named a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow to work on this project.
McElwee serves as a lead author on several major UN science-policy assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Before becoming an academic, she worked in the US Senate for Al Gore and in the Clinton White House on environmental policy, and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship (Kansas and Wadham 1993), where she obtained an MSc in Forestry in the Department of Plant Sciences. Born in Texas, she was raised on a farm in Kansas, and currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey with her husband and daughter.
You can purchase Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam here.
Are you an alumni author?
If you have written a book which was published within the last three years, or is due to be released soon, please email us the following information.
Your full name
Alumni number (or college/year of matriculation)
Title of book
Date of publication
ISBN
Link to purchase the book online
We thank you for sharing your books with us, and will let you know if you are selected for a feature in the coming months.
Please visit our archive page to look back at previous Alumni Authors