DPhil Student
St Catherine's College
Ogden Olivas is a student of environmental and socio-cultural anthropology who’s work centers around informal management of natural resources, especially timber and timber products. His work investigates relationships between rural communities and forests in the context of property, climate, and environmental policy regimes, focusing on the informal, moral, and otherwise continuously changing nature of natural resource networks and groups which sustain life from them.
Ogden's dissertation with Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography phenomenologically grapples with North American communities morally and normatively engaged with the practice of “tree rustling”, a form of community managed timber extraction, as well as other means of informal logging and scavenging which are induced by or involved largely in enclosure and the enactment of environmental ethics and moral boundary making.
Areas of focus: The states of Maine, New York, and Oregon, USA
Key words: extraction, enclosure, climate, community based land management, political ecology, commons, forestry, poaching, sustainability, livelihood, property, risk
Prior degrees:
MPS, Cornell University, Natural Resources and the Environment
BA, Bard College, Writing and Environmental Studies
AS, Prescott College, Ecology
