Forest History Society Events

For centuries, Christian monks have embraced sustainable forestry practices to protect the land around their monasteries. Today, in the United States and elsewhere, monasteries face challenges to managing their lands similar to those of secular landowners, including feeling pressure to sell their lands and managing for climate change. But monasteries have additional challenges associated with being a religious order, too. Join Jason Brown, author of Dwelling in the Wilderness: Modern Monks in the American West (Trinity University Press, 2023), as he discusses the history of monastic forestry and explores some lessons for our times.

Jason M. Brown studied anthropology and international development as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. He earned joint master’s degrees in forestry and theology from Yale University. He completed his PhD in 2017 from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, where his dissertation explored the sense of place of contemporary Catholic monks in the American West. As a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, Jason teaches courses in comparative religion and ecological humanities for the department of Global Humanities and occasionally environmental ethics for the School of Resource and Environmental Management.

To learn more and register, visit: https://foresthistory.org/events/