View of the Mississippi River from Perot State Park

International Conference on Rivers and Civilization:
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Major River Basins


La Crosse, Wisconsin USA
June 25-28, 2006

HOST AND PRESENTER INSTITUTIONS
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Home Page National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium Home Page

CONFERENCE SPEAKER

Black and white photograph of Donald WorsterDonald Worster (University of Kansas , USA):  Roundtable discussion Rivers in History.

Donald Worster is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American University at the University of Kansas.  A leader in the field of environmental history, his research areas include North American environmental history, the history of the American West, the history of evolution, ecology, and exploration, and 19 th- and early 20 th-century U.S. history.  As a leader in the field of environmental history, he has served as president of the American Society for Environmental History, sits on a number of editorial boards, and is general editor of the Cambridge University monograph series, “Studies in Environment and History.”  He has published numerous works, including A River Running West:  The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford University Press, 2001), for which he won the Byron Caldwell Smith Award; Rivers of Empire (1985) which deals with the development of water resources in the West and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Dust Bowl (1979), a study of the Southern Plains in the “dirty thirties,” which won the Bancroft Prize; and Nature’s Economy (1994, second edition), which traces the evolution of ecology from the eighteenth century to the present.  Worster has also received numerous honors, fellowships, and awards, among which are the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology (1997)—he is the first nonscientist to receive it; a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981-82); and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1975-75); and a Mellon Fellowship at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (1974.)