About the Author

Christopher C. Sellers

For the past thirty+ years, I’ve been a suburbanite, with a house and yard on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York.  I also work there; I’m a professor of history at Stony Brook University.  I teach courses there on environmental, public health, climate, urban, and suburban history, among other topics, of the United States and now Mexico, framed in comparative and global perspectives.    Prior to and during my suburban nature project, I’ve been writing books and articles about environmental health, the body, and industrial hazards.  Starting  in the mid-2010s, I returned to my earlier roots as an environmental activist, helping found and serving as project lead and sometime moderator of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/history/people/_faculty/sellers.html

I grew up in a neighborhood that looked suburban but was on the edge of a small town in Western North Carolina.   Back then, I hiked and camped a lot.  Then I went to college at Dartmouth, and through the American Studies program at Yale as well as through the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating from both of these programs in 1992.   Ever since my involvement with the antinuclear movement of the 70’s and early 80’s, I have also kept a hand in environmental and other kinds of community activism.   All these interests came together in my suburban nature project.  Hatched in the mid-to-late 1990’s, it explores the ecological as well as health history of suburbanizing in the United States, and their contributions to the making of modern environmental politics.

Today, I live with my wife and dogs (and occasionally with grown daughter) in a suburban house with yard that we are struggling to make more “sustainable,” even as we try to figure out what that might mean.  I try to grow crops; and I do enjoy hiking the Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelt Trail, even though it is ten miles nearer to the downtown than we are.  And my dream, should I ever get the time and training, is to kayak around the isle of Manhattan.