Donald Worster

Donald Worster (born 1941) is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history. In 2009, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Donald Worster was born in 1941. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and a Master of Arts in 1964 from the University of Kansas. He continued his education at Yale University, earning an M.Phil. in 1970 and a PhD. in history in 1971 working with Howard R. Lamar.

He came to the University of Kansas in 1989 to occupy the Hall Chair in American History, thus returning to his undergraduate institution and his home region. Throughout his career, Worster has written several books including The Wealth of Nature, Under Western Skies, Rivers of Empire, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, Nature's Economy, and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. He is the former president of the American Society for Environmental History and a member of the Western History Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. Throughout his career, he has lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as throughout North America.

Worster is primarily interested in environmental history. He also has strong interests in comparative history (esp. U.S. and Canada), in American regionalism (particularly the West), in agriculture, and in science and technology.

He has defined farms and gardens as "domesticated ecologies," in other words places where human beings change their surroundings and are changed by them.

• 2001: National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography category), A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
• 2002: Caughey Western History Association Prize
• 1979: Bancroft Prize, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.

"Whatever terrain the environmental historian chooses to investigate, he has to address the age-old predicament of how humankind can feed itself without degrading the primal source of life. Today as ever, that problem is the fundamental challenge in human ecology, and meeting it will require knowing the earth well--knowing its history and knowing its limits."