Matthew Morse Booker studies the interactions of human beings and the natural world, particularly on urban coasts. His book Down By The Bay: San Francisco’s History Between The Tides is the first history of the American West's most important estuary and its first city, from the Gold Rush to the creation of the nation’s first urban wildlife refuge. At the Rachel Carson Center he will investigate the rise, collapse, and recovery of oysters in the American diet as part of his larger project on why Americans stopped eating locally in the twentieth century. Matthew did his PhD at Stanford University and is an associate professor of American environmental history at North Carolina State University.