Sasha Gennet

Sasha is the Ecoregional Ecologist at The Nature Conservancy for the Central coast of California, a region stretching from the Bay Area to Santa Barbara, and from the ocean to the Central Valley. Sasha obtained her doctorate from the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley in 2007. She has worked for the past ten+ years in ecological restoration of rare and endangered species in California. Her dissertation focused on the effects of human land use, such as livestock grazing, and abiotic environmental conditions, including climate, on the highly-impacted plant and songbird communities of California’s grasslands. Her goal is to provide practical, science-based, predictive decision-support tools for land managers. However, through her past and current restoration work and research, Sasha has come to believe that science can not, and sometimes should not, provide all the answers for resource managers. Social values, politics, and economics have a strong influence on resource management and environmental conservation. Long-term thinking and a culture of respect for each element of our planet’s human and natural resources are crucial to sustaining and enhancing societies, and to conserving and restoring ecosystems globally. To help move our institutions and culture in that direction, Sasha has worked on science and environmental policy in Washington DC and taught conservation biology to undergraduates at Berkeley and overseas. She worked towards sustainability in her local community at UC Berkeley as co-chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability. Some of projects included campus climate protection and greenhouse gas reduction, sustainable investing of UCB’s endowments, sustainability internships for undergraduates, and the Green Fund, which provides small grants to campus greening projects. She also serves on the board of the Golden Hour Restoration Institute.