Sharon Levy's Bio
I specialize in making the science behind natural resource and conservation issues come alive for a general audience. For the past nineteen years, I've covered environmental issues of all kinds: the ecology of top predators, sewage recycling, bioengineered mosquitoes, archaeological evidence of ancient human impacts on wildlife and fisheries. I'm a contributing editor at OnEarth magazine, and write regularly for National Wildlife, BioScience, Audubon and New Scientist. My work has also appeared in Natural History, Nature, Wildlife Conservation, High Country News and Discovery Channel Online. I'm the author of the book Once and Future Giants: what Ice Age extinctions tell us about the fate of Earth's largest animals, due from Oxford University Press in March 2011.
My writing draws on a decade of experience working as a field biologist in northern California. In those days I kept odd hours with spotted owls, censused migratory birds, quested after rare amphibians, and studied the impact of pollution on wetlands.
I graduated from the University of Illinois-Champaign with a degree in Biology in 1982, and earned a M.S. in Environmental Toxicology at Oregon State University in 1988. My graduate research focused on the effects of pollutants on immune responses, but after two years at the lab bench I fled to the woods.
