Lauren Redmore

Lauren is the first Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute scientist focused on advancing an understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System, specifically, and wilderness and wildlands, generally. Lauren’s work focuses on several key areas, including how diverse people have been able to access, or have been excluded from, wilderness areas and wilderness-making processes, as well as cultural and subsistence values of wilderness areas. 

Among several projects that are in the early stages of development, some key research projects currently include:

• Understanding opportunities and barriers for Wilderness co-management with rightsholders and stakeholders
• Examining the diverse social and psychological impacts of identity-specific outdoor recreation groups and peer-to-peer networks, in particular as it relates to Wilderness
• Exploring the role of wilderness in supporting livelihoods and well-being
• Understanding the ways that people from underrepresented backgrounds connect to wilderness through work

Lauren brings a diverse array of past research. She spent seven years working and studying in sub-Saharan Africa, including for her PhD work studying human-elephant interactions in Botswana. She also studied deforestation outcomes in relationship to municipal-level governance across the Brazilian Amazon with an interdisciplinary team through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. For her masters, Lauren examined the Woman Owning Woodlands Network, an extension program for women forest owners and managers in Western Oregon. Most recently, she led a study to understand barriers and identify potential solutions to the development of an innovative wood products sector, with a focus on community-scaled operations, for the state of California.

Lauren’s broader research interests are centered around questions of how people access and manage natural resources across scale, spanning individual identities, household resource needs, and community values with consideration for wider historical and political contexts. Some key research interests include:

• Wilderness as part of a wider social-ecological system
• Human-wildlife interactions in wilderness
• Impacts of global change on wilderness-related livelihoods
• Calls for land restitution and implications for the future of protected areas