Patrick Gallagher

Patrick Gallagher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. As a cultural and environmental anthropologist, his research questions are driven by an interest in the cultural politics of nature and the growing role of the market in efforts to produce and protect environmental resources.

His dissertation project examined the social making of ecosystem services as objects of conservation concern in the Belize Barrier Reef. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, he studied the social and technical process by which conservation scientists, economists, and programmers have developed a science for valuing ecosystems and how that science has been applied and transformed in the cultural and economic context of coastal Belize. The project also offers insight into how value-driven projects of conservation might be more effectively tailored to accommodate the kinds of cultural and economic diversity that are present in Belize, and elsewhere.

Patrick has a MA in Environmental Anthropology from Stanford University and a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University. Previously, he served as the Director of Public Policy and Watershed Projects Director at a non-profit watershed conservation organization in New Jersey. Prior to that he served as part of AmeriCorps through a training program with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Watershed Management.

A native of Philadelphia, Patrick currently lives in Oakland, CA with his wife Sarah, and two children, Maeve and Emmett.