Brett L. Walker is Regents Professor and Michael P. Malone Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for his work on global environmental history. He studies environmental history, the history of human health, and the history of science, particularly as they relate to Japan. He investigates how nature has imposed its way onto the human past, as well as how humans have sliced, burned, extracted and engineered their needs and desires onto Earth and its living organisms. He is the author of The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Cultur...